


Ashes to Ashes

by dirigibleplumbing



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Background Relationships, Bottom Tony Stark, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Eventual Happy Ending, Everyone lives, Fix-It, Flip Phone, Infinity Gems, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Minor Bruce Banner/Thor, Minor Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Outer Space, Past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Service Top, Spaceships, Temporary Character Death, Thanos (Marvel) Dies, Time Travel, Top Steve Rogers, except the canon character deaths are all temporary because that is the nature of this fic, only Thanos dies, time loops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-04-30 14:30:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 51,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14499060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirigibleplumbing/pseuds/dirigibleplumbing
Summary: After regrouping following some surprise time travel, the world's heroes and sorcerers come up with a plan to protect the Mind and Time Stones by taking them into space in opposite directions. The result involves a lot more time loops than Steve would like, but at least they're getting a second chance to stop Thanos. (As well as a third, and a fourth...) And if Steve takes the opportunity to try to reconcile with Tony, too—well, they have the time, and Steve's going to make the most of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I made some guesses / plot-driven judgment calls about how much time Infinity War takes place over; I chose a little under three days.
> 
> When I published the initial chapters of this, Infinity War had just come out and people were still avoiding spoilers. I selected "choose not to use archive warnings" in order to hide the fact that the story opens with the major spoiler that, y'know, half the universe is dead. I have now changed the warning to include "major character death." In additional to the canonical ones, which take place offscreen and before the action of the fic, some major characters die, or seem to die, at various times throughout the story. I promise their deaths are quickly fixed, but watch out if this sort of thing bothers you! I did not warn for violence because I don't consider it to be graphic. I tagged it as canon-typical but I think, if anything, it leans toward a little less graphic than the films. Let me know if there are any warnings or tags I have overlooked and I will add them! 
> 
> I'm so excited this story is finally complete! I couldn't have done it without my friend A, who betaed the first bunch of chapters, [dasyatidae](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dasyatidae/pseuds/dasyatidae), who betaed a big chunk in the middle, or [arukou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou), who betaed the last two. Thank you to my betas and to all the readers who stuck through with this WIP!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A meeting of surviving superheroes and sorcerers to determine their next steps is interrupted when Wong announces that the Eye of Agamotto has been activated. One moment, Steve is in the New York Sanctum, the day after the battle in Wakanda. He blinks and it’s 3 days earlier, hours before he got the call from Bruce. And now when his phone buzzes, it’s a text from Tony, saying, _any thoughts on time travel?_

It’s barely been a day since Bucky crumbled before Steve’s eyes, and now he’s sitting at a sprawling wooden table in a sorcerer’s Manhattan mansion and Tony won’t look at him. Steve can’t stop staring, can’t let himself turn away from the last flare of hope left for him in this darkness.

It’s the only feeling he has left that isn’t despair, so he’s holding onto it as hard as he can.

He hadn’t even had any surprise to spare when a magic portal had opened up in the Wakandan palace and Wong had asked Steve—and Colonel Rhodes, with whom he’d been sharing a silent breakfast at the time—to come to the city to work out what to do next. Yesterday he’d met a talking tree, a sentient raccoon, and he and the king of an African nation had fought hand-to-hand with alien invaders to protect the magic rock that powers the android Wanda’s been sneaking off to secretly date. So following this strange sorcerer—Wong had been affronted by the term _magician—_ through the circle of sizzling golden light seemed the thing to do.

“I cannot leave the New York Sanctum,” Wong had explained.

He left them in a sunlit hallway overlooking a sweeping staircase, saying he would be back with more people to help. Steve and Rhodes followed the sound of raised voices to a wood-paneled room filled with objects in glass cases, where Thor and a woman clad in battered black leather armor were leaning against a built-in bookcase and sharing a bottle of something violently purple. The woman laughed, a pleasant sort of delighted cackle; Thor’s own laughter, subdued by his standards but still booming, joined hers. “Comrades!” Thor exclaimed on seeing them, standing unsteadily to wrap Steve and Rhodes in one of his bracing hugs.

When Thor released them, they’d been joined by Natasha, Tony, and a blue woman who stood as taut as a bowstring. Steve opened his mouth to say something—a greeting, a condolence, _something_ —but before he even finished taking in a breath, Rhodes and Tony were clinging to each other. Steve jerked to approach them, but they were already walking away, sharing fractured smiles and murmuring to each other. Natasha stood beside him and squeezed his hand reassuringly.

Wong soon returned with Bruce and a set of Wakandan Kimoyo beads, and asked them to follow him to a meeting room.

So here they are, preparing to mundanely review their options after nearly three days of relentless impossibilities. The day’s a bright one, the sky empty of clouds, and the sun through the beveled window panes casts bright rhombuses of sunbeams on the expansive tabletop. Wong uses the beads to pull up a hologram of Shuri, who’s stayed at the palace to help what’s left of her country, the Asgardian refugees, and assist with the transfer of power now that her brother is gone.

Thor and the woman he’s with keep drinking the entire time they talk. Thor mutters—loudly—about a never-empty stein of beer that Dr. Strange, who apparently was Wong’s predecessor, had made for him on his last visit, while the woman—who it turns out is a Valkyrie—alternately elbows him, rolls her eyes, and takes swigs from a flask in addition to the new bottle they’re sharing. The Valkyrie tells them between gulps how she and the surviving Asgardians had landed in Jabari Land after learning Thor was in the area. Thor, briefly, recounts his time battling his sister, the destruction of his planet, the deaths of Heimdall, Odin, and Loki. “He died bravely,” he adds when he gets to his brother. “I know that Midgard has its quarrels with him, and I do not belittle the death and hurt he has caused in this world and on others. Still he was my brother, a warrior in his own right. He gave his life to save mine, and at the last he defied Thanos himself.” At that, Thor plucks the bottle from the Valkyrie’s hand, downs what remains, and smashes it on the ground. Wong looks affronted but doesn’t say anything.

After that, Rocket picks up the story, sharing how they went to Nidavellir and a Dwarf King forged the Stormbreaker axe with their help—though the way Rocket tells it, it’s Groot who’s the hero of the piece. “And then he had to go and die on me again,” Rocket says weakly, and all Steve can think of is how many times he’s lost Bucky, how many times he’s watched him fall.

Nat, Bruce, and Rhodes fill everyone in on what occurred in Wakanda. Steve can’t seem to find his voice to join them. His mind is nothing but swirls of feathery dust, a list of names: Bucky, Sam, T’Challa.

Then it’s Tony’s turn. He stares blankly at a patch of sunlight on a corner of the table where no one is sitting and tells them how the kid from Queens—Peter—followed Dr. Strange to Ebony Maw’s ship, and Tony, of course, went after them. How they ended up on Titan, trying to take on Thanos on their own terms, away from Earth. When he mentions how Dr. Strange used the Time Stone to look at possible futures, Wong, sitting behind him, becomes even more stern and seems to expand into himself.

Tony’s voice tightens when he describes the planet, and the way his face shifts and Rhodes reaches for him reminds Steve of a nightmare Tony had described to him years ago, back when they were close enough to share that sort of thing: a ravaged, empty world, nothing but smog and refuse and the scaffolding of civilization and the unearthly buoyancy of the wreckage of spacecraft, where he watched, helpless, while everyone near him died. _Nothing but dust and blood_ , Steve remembers T’Challa saying.

“I should have been able to talk Quill down, we almost had him,” Tony says quietly when he gets to their showdown with Thanos. Their plan sounds more coordinated than the one Steve had been a part of, and he thinks for a moment of _together_ , and how they might have fared if they had been, the original Avengers side-by-side with these Guardians and Thor’s Dwarven axe and the power of the Sorcerer Supreme.

“He said—he _promised_ ,” Tony chokes out, his voice rough. “That if it came down to our lives or the Stone, he’d choose the Stone every time. But here I am!” He makes a sound like he’s trying to laugh and can’t. He doesn’t need to say out loud, _But Peter isn’t._ They all know.

“Dr. Strange is a protector of the Infinity Stones,” Wong cuts in. “There is method behind his decision. I trust it will become clear in time.”

“I can’t wait,” Tony says, sounding more disbelieving than flippant.

“Are you finished?” the blue woman asks, her dark eyes flicking around the room. Perhaps satisfied by the silence she gets in response, she says, “We must track down Thanos and exact our vengeance.”

“ _There’s_ the maniac killer I know and love,” Tony says softly, probably not intending anyone else to hear, and Steve’s reminded that the two of them were alone on the _Benatar_ all the way back to Earth from Titan. Nebula, someone had called her. Steve remembers an afternoon—years ago, lifetimes ago—at a sidewalk cafe in DC with Thor and Jane Foster. Jane had been talking about her work on the potential of using radiation pressure for spacecraft propulsion, nothing Steve understood in the slightest. There had been a bit about lasers, maybe, he thinks. What he remembers now is when she’d sidetracked to define the word nebula: an interstellar cloud of dust.

“Indeed!” Thor agrees, sounding almost like his old self for a moment. Beside him, the Valkyrie salutes with her flask and takes a hearty swig.

Shuri takes the reins of the conversation from there, explaining how a certain type of Wakandan aircraft could be modified to be space-worthy. Tony, Bruce, and Nebula interject at times, before Rhodes points out that they don’t know where Thanos is. Bruce has some ideas about that, energy signatures and high-energy radiation and secondary particles. Shuri is nodding, only correcting Bruce here and there, and Steve lets it wash over him, knowing he doesn’t need to follow this. He trusts them to take care of it and it let him know how he can help.

“Between Princess Diaries, Rocky, me, Rhodey, and Bruce, we’ve got it covered for scientific and engineering brainpower. Wong here can fill in any mystical gaps, help us consolidate supplies.” Tony’s motioning with his hands, and Steve notices that he’s not wearing the engagement ring that’s been featured in all the press photos for the last two years. (Particularly the 5-page spread that was in that one issue of _People_ right after the engagement.) Tony catches him staring and shoves his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, glaring at him. Steve can’t help but enjoy the attention; Tony’s _looking_ at him, Tony’s alive and solid and still cares enough to be annoyed. “She’s better off this way.” God, at least Ms. Potts is still alive.

“Tones,” Rhodes says, both sad and admonishing. He places a hand on Tony’s arm.

Tony pushes it off, not quite elbowing his friend, more of a firm, dismissing nudge. “Not what we’re here to talk about,” he snaps in Steve’s direction. He turns to Nebula and the hologram of Shuri. “We can build it. Tell us what you need.”

Shuri starts to say something, but her voice is drowned out by a sound like a gong being struck.

Wong jumps to his feet. “The Eye of Agamotto.”

“What?” Tony says sharply, standing as well. “Isn’t that Strange’s neckwear?”

The Time Stone, Steve fills in for himself, pushing out of his chair when he sees Wong start to make for the doorway. The others are standing now too, but Steve’s faster, and is standing shoulder to shoulder with Wong and Tony while Rocket scampers across the tabletop. The three of them crowd through the door. “It’s active,” Wong says, sounding like he thinks that explains anything. “Strange must have used it to—” The gong sounds again. Wong’s hands swirl, his fingers forming precise movements like he’s playing an invisible instrument, and a glittering light sparks from them. Particles shimmer from his fingertips in an amber cloud. The light brushes over Steve’s skin, making him feel like he’s standing in the eye of a storm of fireworks. He closes his eyes against the bright flash, reaching for Tony on instinct.

When Steve opens his eyes not even a second later—Tony would know the number of milliseconds, he finds himself thinking—he’s in a dim room that, as he adjusts to the change of illumination, he recognizes as the hotel room in Bern where he’d been staying before the flip phone rang. Bruce, not Tony, had been on the other end of the line, and that had been his first sign that something was wrong, even more wrong than any reason Tony might have had to call him. Bruce had explained how no one could reach Tony, that they needed to get to Vision, and the stakes of their upcoming battle.

He’s alone, and the room is as empty as he remembered it being. As if in an echo of his memories, the little phone in his pocket buzzes. There’s only one other phone that has the number for his.

 

 **Tony:** _any thoughts on time travel?_

 

They’d been in communication since Steve sent him the phone, but Steve’s always the one to initiate conversation, and Tony goes weeks without responding to him. This had been one of those weeks—one of a series of several, in fact.

Steve’s heart is racing. He feels lightheaded, like there’s not enough air reaching his lungs. It occurs to him that he should be worried that he’s dreaming or dissociating, but the panic and confusion are cohering into a kind of harsh, almost painful lucidity that makes him sure that whatever he’s experiencing is real. The date the phone displays is that same day as well. The time reads 12:56 PM, which if it’s to be believed means it’s the early hours of the morning in New York.

 

 **Steve:** _you remember too?  
_ **Steve:** _Thanos and Nebula and Rocket?_

 

Not expecting a quick response to what could very well read as a string of nonsense, he pulls out his main phone—a smartphone that’s just a few years out of date—and makes a call.

“Steve?”

Steve takes a moment to breathe and steady himself.

“Steve?” Sam asks again. “You okay? You buttdial me?”

“Meet me at the jet,” Steve says, slipping into his command voice. If he’s right about what’s happened, they have to get to the Time Stone as soon as possible. He can explain on the way. Hell, he can celebrate on the way. For now, he has another chance at this, he has another chance at all of it, and he’s going to take it, he’s going to do it right. “Is Natasha with you?”

“Yeah. Everything okay? Is it—”

“No one’s after us. But we have to get to New York. They need our help. I’ll explain on the way.”

“You got it,” Sam replies, falling easily into the role of a soldier.

“You and Nat call Wanda, she and Vision need to get to Wakanda as—”

“Fuck, Wanda’s with _Vision_ , what is she—” Steve can hear Natasha swearing in the background as Sam says that.

“—soon as possible, Vision’s life is on the line. I’m going to call T’Challa and give him a heads up,” Steve plows on. Maybe there’s even a Wakandan jet that Wanda and Vision can take, get there even faster.

“On it,” Sam says. “Looking forward to the whole story, Cap.”

Steve already has his go bag over one shoulder when he disconnects from the call, and is at the door of his hotel room when the flip phone buzzes again.

 

 **Tony:** _Thor and a Valkyrie, Stormbreaker, Wong, yep_

 **Steve:** _is it the Time Stone?_

 **Tony:** _must be  
_ **Tony:** _Pepper doesn’t remember_

 **Steve:** _neither does anyone here  
_ **Steve:** _Wong did something just before it happened_

 **Tony:** yeah, felt like being glitterbombed  
**Tony:** on my way to the NY sanctum to see Strange  
**Tony:** _Bruce will be incoming early this afternoon NY time  
_ **Tony:** unless there’s a way to get to Thor, Heimdall, et. al before then

 **Steve:** _I’ll be there in 6 hours  
_ **Steve:** _will try to make it 5_

 **Tony:** _together, huh_

 **Steve:** _always_

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Cap, Bruce, Tony, and Strange discuss time travel and make plans. Tony talks to Steve long enough to ask him something that Steve is wholly unprepared to hear.

“Okay, so, imagine time is like—falling down a sheer cliff face,” Bruce says. “Without outside intervention, you’re only gonna go one way, and that’s down. The Eye is like, I don’t know, a grappling hook, I’m not a mountaineer, okay. So you throw the grappling hook up—”

“Or shoot it, could be a grappling hook gun,” Tony supplies.

“Sure, you shoot the grappling hook gun,” Bruce agrees. “And it pulls you back up to a spot in your fall where you were before. So on the one hand gravity—time—is still pulling you down. And you only have the one grappling gun, so you can’t get any further up than where it’s fastened. But now you have this line that you can use to control your descent. You might be able to pull yourself back up a short ways sometimes, or, um, even stop the fall for a little bit.”

Dr. Strange gives an unimpressed nod. “A descriptive, if entirely incorrect, metaphor.”

Bruce shrugs and smiles a little. Tony rolls his eyes. He’s shifting on his feet, his arms crossed, his eyes darting around the room.

They’re back in the Sanctum, except most of them don’t remember being there the last time. They don’t remember the destruction, the desolation, of Thanos’ victory. Only Steve, Tony, Wong, and Dr. Strange himself—as the one who initiated the time reset in the first place—do. Tony and Rhodes are standing beside each other in the marble-floored hall where they’ve congregated, their shoulders bumping casually. Steve aches to think of Bucky, alive, ignorant for the moment of what’s coming for them, temporarily safe but out of his reach nonetheless.

“Falling is one-dimensional,” Natasha says. “In this metaphor, can we go to one side, grab onto something—”

“Or fly away,” Sam mutters. Steve’s been keeping Sam in his line of sight ever since he’d seen him in the quinjet. If anything happens to Sam, Steve’s at least going to be there to witness it.

“Aaand that’s one of the many places the analogy falls apart,” Strange says.

Wong ceases his pacing for a moment to turn to face them. “Any use of the Eye creates branches in time, risks alternate timelines, unstable dimensional openings, spacial paradoxes, and destroying causality.” It’s both a warning and an acknowledgement of what Strange has said. “You’re talking about intentionally traveling to alternate realities. That would only hasten the process.”

“Can something really be ‘hastened’ if the laws of time are being altered?” Tony wonders aloud. “Hey, you said we went back 64 hours, right?” At Strange’s nod, he continues. “There a reason for that? That it’s a power of 2?”

“Time is fractal,” Bruce murmurs.

“You’re astonishingly close to being on the right track while still being thoroughly wrong, but for the moment the issue is irrelevant,” Strange says dismissively. “You all wanted to know more about the Time Stone, is this sufficient?”

“So we can use it to create another, shorter loop. We just can’t go back further than we already have. And we can slow time or freeze it. Do I have that right?” Steve asks.

“Other than the crucial part where using it could unravel all of space-time and therefore doing any of that is a last resort, yes.” Strange looks at everyone in the room in turn. “Don’t let the fact that we currently possess the Stone make you complacent. It didn’t stop the carnage last time.”

“It sort of did,” Rhodes points out. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

“For now,” Natasha says.

“From her last update, Shuri will have finished separating the Mind Stone from Vision,” Sam says. “What’s next?”

“We get the hell out of here,” Tony says immediately.

“Take the battle away from Earth,” Steve muses.

Tony still won’t look at him, not really, but for a moment his eyes rest on a spot near Steve’s shoulder as he says, “Exactly.”

“Seems the least we can do,” Sam agrees. “So how’s the progress with our ride?”

“I’ll talk to Okoye,” Natasha says.

“Any word from Foster and Selvig?” Rhodes asks. Earlier in the day, Tony had given them a rundown of the situation and tasked them with finding a way to contact Thor or Heimdall.

Tony shakes his head and chews on his lips. “Not yet.”

After working out a few more details, they split up to make final preparations before heading to Wakanda. There’s nothing for Steve to do, and he stands there for a moment feeling useless, staring at the network of lines etched into the gleaming tiles, his feet shuffling against where his go bag rests on the floor. He tries to remind himself that it’s already better this time. A few hours ago he might have given anything to just say goodbye to Bucky for once, and now he has the chance for so much more.

His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a door swinging open down the hall, then Tony’s voice. “—I’m going _right now_ , it’s only—” He cuts himself off as he tramps loudly toward Steve, holding a sleek, paper-thin phone against one ear, rubbing his eyes with his other hand. “It really _isn’t_ the right—because Thanos is going to—I told you, there’s a wizard, it’s time travel, there’s— _yes_ , it’s even implied by special relativity—hey, what happened to six impossible things before breakfast, huh, I’m—okay. I’m here.” Tony lowers the phone and looks Steve in the eye. It’s the closest he’s intentionally come to Steve since everything with Thanos started—since the bunker in Siberia, really. “Steve, would you be the best man in my wedding?”

“Yes,” Steve says before he full realizes what’s happening. “Uh, if you really want me to, I’ll be there.”

Tony already has the phone back to his ear and is turning to walk away again. “See? I can—that is commit—no. No, honey, I’m—”

Steve’s eavesdropping is cut off by Bruce’s arrival. He’s picking at his fingernails as he looks between Steve, leaning against a window with his arms cross, and Tony’s agitated, retreating form. “I’m a groomsman,” Bruce says, making a face halfway between a smile and a wince. “Rhodes is officiating,” he adds, answering a question Steve hadn’t articulated to himself yet. “Uh, I’m glad you’re putting aside your differences.”

“I don’t think that’s really what’s going on,” Steve says, still watching Tony go.

“What went down between you two, anyway?”

Steve forces his eyes to meet Bruce’s. “What did Tony tell you happened?”

Bruce shrugs a little. “That the Avengers broke up. That you two weren’t talking.”

“That it?”

“He said there was some political thing? He thought that would’ve gotten worked out eventually though. He mentioned Sokovia.” Bruce looks more intent now. “Was this about Ultron? Or about what happened in Johannesburg?”

It feels like all of that happened decades ago. Steve shakes his head.

“Good, because Ultron wasn’t just Tony. I was there too, and Johannesburg was all the Hulk.”

“Bruce, I didn’t—I don’t blame either of you for what Ultron did,” Steve manages.

“Okay. That’s nice to hear.” Bruce looks thoughtful. “What, then?”

“I kept something from him. Something I shouldn’t have. And it—well, it blew up in our faces.”

“That sounds like Tony, yeah,” Bruce agrees.

“No, it wasn’t—not like that. There was a third party. No one had all the information and it just—we found Bucky,” Steve says. “The third party, Zemo, he’d framed him for a bombing at the UN. A lot of people died. They had orders to kill him. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“You left out the part about the ‘superhero version of the Patriot Act,’” Rhodes says as he comes into the hallway from a connecting passage, raising his eyebrows in a pointed look. He has a small suitcase under one arm, and is rolling a gleaming metal case behind him with the other—probably suitcase armor.

“The what?” Bruce asks.

“That’s what you called it, right Cap?” Rhodes says mildly, coming to stop beside Steve and Bruce.

“Let’s not,” Natasha says. Steve hadn’t noticed her arrival, but then, he probably wasn’t supposed to. All she’s brought with her from Bern is in a sleek backpack she’s wearing.

“Maybe we should clear the air.” Rhodes has his hands resting casually in his belt-loops and his face is neutral, but the gaze he’s pinning Steve with is ferocious.

“It doesn’t matter now.” As Steve speaks, Sam comes in, long strides bringing him to Steve’s side in a few moments.

“You’re talking about the Accords, man?” Sam asks. “Now?”

“I was filling Bruce in on some of what he missed,” Steve says. “It’s really not important right now.”

Sam crosses his arms. “Now that we’re right and if they had their way we wouldn’t be _allowed_ to save the universe because some stuffed suits say so.”

“I have clearance to be here,” Rhodes says easily. “And I have clearance to operate in Wakanda too, if I follow T’Challa’s lead. There’s allowances for emergency intervention and world-ending situations, and I think this qualifies.” He looks from Steve to Natasha to Sam. “You’re the ones who’re breaking them by being here. And whose fault is that?”

The door Tony went through opens and then closes, more softly this time than before. He walks quickly toward them, wearing a fake smile. He has his own suitcase armor, plus two duffel bags over one shoulder. His case is bulkier than Rhodes’, and has some blocky rectangular attachments seemingly magnetized to it, one of which juts awkwardly past either side of the main case. It seems to be making the whole thing harder to navigate, and doesn’t hold up to the sleek, streamlined designs Tony usually favors, like it was added as an afterthought. “Aw, honeybear, don’t scare off our backup.”

“Just making conversation,” Rhodes says easily.

“Still.” Tony’s firm. “Not the time for that kind of talk. Eyes on the prize.”

“Thanos,” Bruce says forcefully.

“Agreed.” Natasha and Bruce exchange a warm, sad look.

Tony passes one of the duffels to Bruce, who breaks Natasha’s gaze to take it.

“Hey, we’re cool, right?” Sam says, elbowing Rhodes with a hesitant smile.

Rhodes’ face softens, and then he smiles too and nudges Sam on the shoulder. “Yeah, you’re okay, Wilson.”

And it’s that easy for the two of them, apparently. Just like how Vision and Wanda made it work between them, too. Natasha, following his stare, offers Steve a little smirk.

“Let’s find our sorcerers, shall we?” Tony puts in, clapping his hands together and barreling forward.

As they head down the hallway, Rhodes spares a moment to narrow his eyes at Steve for a moment, then moves to catch up with the others.

Steve grabs his wrist before he gets far. “What’s the problem?”

“I got no problem working together, Cap,” Rhodes answers, pulling away. “I trust you in the field, and you can do the same with me.”

That's not what he asked, but Steve drops Rhodes' wrist and lets him go. After a moment to breathe, Steve moves to catch up. In a few steps he’s walking abreast with Natasha and Tony.

“Is Peter alright?” Steve asks, hoping to take advantage of Tony’s pretenses that they can behave as if everything is fine between them. He doesn’t need to ask if Tony’s checked in with Peter or made a plan to keep him safe; he already knows that much.

“For now,” Tony replies, keeping his eyes pointed in front of him. “I made some code fixes to his new suit this morning, it should keep him out of trouble.”

“Which new suit?” Rhodes teases affectionately, slowing until he falls into pace with Tony.

“Well he’s not getting his hands on the IEVA pressure suit armor this time, I’ll tell you that much.”

“You made the kid a spacesuit?” Natasha chuckles.

“Wasn’t enough last time.” Tony shakes his head.

Rhodes opens his mouth to say something, but Strange and Wong are approaching them now. “Ready? Let’s go,” Strange says before they have time to reply, already forming a portal in front of a nearby window seat.

One by one they step through. The other side is the Wakandan palace landing pad. Waiting there is T’Challa, flanked by Okoye and the other Dora Milaje. Wanda and Vision stand nearby. And beside them—

“Bucky,” Steve breathes.

“How ya doin’, Steve,” Bucky says, smiling like Steve hasn’t seen him do since—well, since they met like this, in this same spot, three days ago as far as Steve’s concerned.

“Better,” Steve replies, as Bucky wraps him in a hug.

“Nat,” Bucky says, turning to Natasha.

“James,” she says softly.

After everyone greets one another—and is given weapons, shields, and other tidbits Shuri thought they might be needing—it’s T’Challa who calls them all together, saying, “We should prepare to depart.”

There are two space-worthy ships, and they have two of the Stones. “I will go with the Mind Stone,” Wong says. “I assume you will be joining me?” He addresses Vision and Wanda. They nod.

“We should split up people with similar abilities,” Steve suggests.

“You two stay with the Time Stone,” Strange says, pointing at Steve and Tony. “You’re already linked to it.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense for there to be someone who remembers the other timeline with each ship?” Tony says.

“Wong will be with the Mind Stone,” Strange reminds him evenly.

No one disagrees with Steve’s suggestion, though he comes to realize that it splits up Tony and Rhodes, who not only both have the armor but also have similar scientific and engineering backgrounds. The other talents among them are grouped in threes or fours: Steve, Bucky, T’Challa, and to some extent Vision, each have their own version of super-strength and accelerated healing; Strange, Wong, and Wanda have similar capabilities; Sam, Tony, Rhodes, and Wanda are their flyers now that Vision’s abilities are reduced without the stone; and Sam, Okoye, and Natasha are all baseline humans with incredible training and tech. He’s not sure how to count Bruce, since the Hulk has been so unwilling to make an appearance since meeting Thanos.

Steve ends up assigned to Strange’s ship along with Tony, Sam, Bruce, Bucky, and Natasha. Bucky and Nat are holding hands as they climb aboard, Steve notices. He follows not far behind them.

Beside him, Tony is saying goodbye to Wong. “When can I expect that wedding invitation, Stark?” Wong asks over a handshake.

“I’ll send it by owl post as soon as we have a date,” Tony assures him.

“You haven’t set a date?” Bruce asks, shifting his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other.

“It’ll be a spring wedding,” Tony says. “Or fall maybe, fall is nice.”

Then Steve is inside the ship, with no further excuse to linger. As he heads to find where he’s bunking and set down his bag, he remembers that Tony and Pepper have been engaged for almost two years. And Tony—who always has a plan for everything, who made dozens of suits for Peter to cover every possible contingency, who goes out on an ordinary day wearing a nanotech version of the Iron Man suit embedded in his chest just in case of an emergency—still hasn’t made a plan for his wedding. Other than his groomsmen, apparently. Right. Steve still doesn’t know what to think about that.

After that it’s time for takeoff, and Steve works to focus on the matter at hand. Stop Thanos. Get everyone home safe. A celebration for saving the universe is the perfect time for a wedding, he thinks.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s on a spaceship with Tony and the Time Stone. They’re joined by an unexpected passenger. Tony’s brought something for Steve. Later, Steve tries to have a conversation with Tony.

Steve’s barely made it to the cabin he’s claimed and begun unpacking his bag when he hears the yelling. He doesn’t know the layout of the ship well enough to guess where it’s coming from, but follows the sounds to a room full of screens and sparkling blue lights.

“I’ll tell you how you can _help_ , you can _help_ by getting your pubescent butt off of this spaceship and back to your aunt—”

“But Mr. Stark—”

“Nope,” Tony interrupts, his eyes so hard Steve wonders how Peter isn’t flinching. “You’re going to get in that escape pod _right now_ and we’ll talk later about this whole stowing away thing.”

“You really need to go,” Steve says as enters the room.

“Captain America!” Peter squeaks.

“Oh, of course, he’s impressed by _you_ ,” Tony spits.

“No, I just—didn’t expect to see you here. In, um. Space.”

“You’re going to be needed at home, Peter,” Steve says firmly, crossing his arms.

“That’s what I’ve been _saying_ ,” Tony bites out. “They’re missing you down there. We’ve got superheroes to spare. See?”

“But—”

“How did you even get up here?” Steve asks.

“Uh, Shuri helped me,” Peter admits.

“It’s a teenage conspiracy. Okay. Escape pod. Now,” Tony says firmly, putting an arm around Peter’s shoulders and nudging him toward a wall backlit with white pentagons and illuminated Wakandan lettering. His fingers skim across the surface, something hitches and then unlatches, and the wall opens to reveal a small, padded compartment. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Peter says finally, moving to get inside. Tony has his arms around him before he can get far. “Uh, Mr. Stark? Are you—reaching for the door?”

“Sure kid,” Tony agrees. He straightens and pats Peter on the shoulder. “Now get the hell out of here.” He gives Peter a little shove, then presses some more panels on the wall nearby. The door shuts, replaced by a screens showing the pod being deployed.

Tony blinks at it, his body language closed off, his eyes glittering wetly.

“Tony—” Steve starts.

“Thanks for having my back with the kid,” Tony says, turning abruptly and heading out of the room. “C’mon, I got something for you.”

Steve trails after him, wondering if he’ll ever find his footing with Tony again. At least he’s getting a chance to try.

Tony leads him up a ladder on one wall to another part of the ship. There are seats and shelves built into the walls, with a row of small tables coming out of the floor. In the center is something like a composite kitchen island, covered in small doors and drawers. Tony’s case is tucked in one corner, next to some sleek black crates that probably hold provisions from Wakanda.

Tony bends down and removes the slim rectangular case that Steve had noticed before. Tony passes it to him as he moves to stand, and the second the weight of it hits Steve’s hand he knows what it is.

He slides the case open anyway, to rest his eyes on it—and there it is. His shield.

“It’s yours,” Tony says simply. “Enjoy.” He claps a hand on Steve’s shoulder and, by the time Steve looks up again, he’s alone in the room.

Steve heads back to his cabin to keep unpacking. His room is narrow, barely the size of some of the closets in the tower or the upstate Avengers compound. There are lockers and cabinets built into every surface, and a tabletop and two seats that fold down from the wall. When his few changes of clothes are are arranged in drawers, he pulls himself into the bed—it’s a nook built into the wall, which seems to be the norm for anything resembling furniture on the ship—and closes the curtain across it. For a moment, he sits against an upholstered wall, running his hands over the surface of his shield. It can’t mean anything that Tony gave it back to him—not what he wants it to mean, anyway. He just knew Steve would be needing it, that’s all.

When Steve makes his way back to what he figures must be the mess hall, Bucky and Natasha are sitting in one of the alcoves, sharing a plate of something pre-made and mashed. Steve slides in beside them and catches the end of a story Bucky is telling about keeping goats in Wakanda, including one that kept trying to eat his hair. It’s easy to fall back into a comfortable rhythm with Bucky. Even hearing about goats—something Steve can’t remember ever discussing with Bucky before—is familiar, easy, at the same time that it’s distant, a piece of something lost that he never thought would return to him.

An encounter between one of the nanny goats and an African wild dog reminds Natasha of an incident on a recent mission to Madripoor when Steve ended up cornered by an Inhuman with the ability to communicate with and control animals—along with a chow chow, an akita, some kind of mastiff, several jindos, and a pair of pugs. Natasha’s retelling is much funnier than it was living it; Steve hadn’t exactly been in a hurry to fight his way through a small herd of people’s pets, nor to let his opponent get away with the biotech he’d stolen, so it had been difficult to find the humor of the situation at the time.

“At least you aren’t allergic to them any more,” Bucky says.

“Hard to appreciate when an akita has its teeth in your ankle,” Steve insists.

“Such a complainer,” Bucky scoffs.

Natasha finishes her story, and something in her description of a stray Shih tzu who had joined the fray near the end reminds Bucky an unfortunate haircut Steve ended up with when they were 8 years old, which he begins gleefully describing before Steve cuts that right off by asking about where in space the ship is.

The answer, it turns out, is nowhere in particular. The other ship, with the Mind Stone, is heading in the direction of Asgard and where they expect the Guardians to be right now. This one is on course in roughly the opposite direction—more precisely toward Knowhere, the last known location of the Reality Stone. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to do but wait—for Thanos to find them, for them to find Thanos, or to hear that their sister ship has found him and successfully defeated him.

A few hours later, Sam pokes his head in and asks Steve for some company while he works on his gear. Steve follows him to the spacious room where the escape pod had been. Tony and Bruce are already there, bent over an open panel in the floor and examining the innards of the ship. With a nod of acknowledgement, Sam picks a patch of empty floor and starts spreading out his wings. The two pairs work quietly side by side for some time. Bruce and Tony murmur about Vibranium and alloys and magnetic levitation, while Steve and Sam carefully disassemble and clean the Falcon wings.

When Tony stands, stretching and saying something to Bruce about heading to the engine room to check out the propulsion system, Steve makes an excuse to Sam and moves to go after him. They’re just about done with the wings, anyway.

Tony eyes him. “Need something, Cap?”

“I wanted to thank you. For returning my—the shield,” Steve says firmly.

“Consider me thanked.”

“And for—I’m sure it’s not exactly easy, being on a ship with—with all of us.”

Tony closes his eyes and rubs at his forehead, his whole body vibrating. “God, I miss Nebula. Batshit crazy, sure, but she didn’t waste time on pity, sympathy, or bullshit.” He opened his eyes again, meeting Steve’s head-on. “I don’t need your platitudes, Rogers.”

“I’m not—Tony, wait.”

“You’re making me think longingly on a monologue about disemboweling Thanos that lasted long enough to watch grass grow, take a hint, will you? We’re fine. We can do this, we can work together.”

“I—don’t know if I can,” Steve admits, swallowing and looking away.

“Well that—” Tony stops. He stares at his shuffling feet. “What did I do to piss you off this time?”

“No, I’m saying it’s _me_ , _I_ can’t do this, I can’t—it’s awful seeing you like this.”

Tony frowns. “Should’ve thought of that earlier, then.” It’s nearly a whisper.

“I wish I had,” Steve says, trying to take in every one of Tony’s movements, to read his thoughts there. “We can’t all be geniuses.”

“Story of my life,” Tony agrees, stuffing his hands in his pants pockets. He glances at Steve for a moment, then slides his eyes to the side, biting his lip. “You done now?”

“Why did you ask me to be your best man?”

“It’s not complicated.”

“Explain it to me,” Steve insists.

“It’s something I thought of back when, you know, the team was together. Rhodey was already ordained, some mail service thing, these Air Force buddies of his had a thing in 2012. Anyway. I guess I mentioned it to Pep at some point, she has all this family, so—and then we started in on the wedding thing—Pep and I had made up, after everything, so, and it had all just happened, Leipzig, Siberia—well, it felt like it.” Tony scrubs at his face with a hand. “It didn’t seem like a reason not to have you there. But I kept putting it off, that’s all. There were a lot of other things going on,” he adds, and it sounds like something he’s said many times before.

“Well, thank you,” Steve says. His voice sounds much firmer than he feels. “I’m—looking forward to being there.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Tony stares at him for a moment, then his eyes flick down the corridor. He clears his throat. “Uh, I’m gonna just—I’m going to go take apart the engines and put them back together.”

“Can I help?”

“Not really,” Tony says quickly. “Well—you can pass me screwdrivers, if you want.”

“If you don’t want company—”

Tony’s already heading down the hall and up a chute toward what must be the engine room. “Just don’t talk too much,” he calls down the ladder.

Steve ends up keeping track of the modular, magnetic fasteners and various panels that had been holding in place while Tony dissects electronic components and examines shimmering purple circuit boards. Trying not to press his luck, Steve bites his tongue. At first the silence is tense, and he watches as Tony takes a deep breath and slowly relaxes his grip on the bundle of tubes and wires he’s holding. After some time, though, when he looks up at Tony, the frame of his shoulders has settled, and his gaze is focused on his work instead of flickering around the room to avoid Steve.

He finds himself watching Tony’s hands, a habit he’s never broken himself of no matter how many times he’s seen Tony at work. He still isn’t wearing the engagement ring, Steve notices. Tony’s hands are clean, not greased with motor oil like Steve’s seen them so any times before. His nails are longer than usual, not extra long, but like they’re in need of a trim. Steve remembers Tony describing holding Peter as he faded away, imagines those hands grasping at where Peter had been and catching only dust.

By Steve’s eye, Tony’s disassembled and reassembled nearly every section of the engine—somehow without actually disabling any of its functionality—when an alarm klaxon fills the room. They both jump to their feet, Tony putting on a pair of sunglasses and saying, “Friday, you still got your hooks in the ship’s computers?”

Friday must answer him because Tony nods tightly after a second and continues his side of the conversation. “Prep the armors.”

“What is it?” Steve asks as they move toward the exit.

“There’s a ship here,” Tony replies. “Not a friendly one. Already firing on us.”

“Thanos? Or Black Order?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it.”

“How do you have Friday out here?”

“I don’t have all of her,” Tony explains as they make their way up the chute ladders. “And she’s not connected to her usual resources back home, or much of anything, really. Talk to me Friday, where’s the action happening?”

They’re back to back, scrambling down ladders on either side of the passage, when the ship shudders. Steve nearly loses footing and his knuckles are white around the rung he’s holding onto as he turns to check on Tony, but by the time he gets a look, Tony's already moving again. “Ship’s disabled. We're being boarded.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ship is disabled and being boarded. Steve comes up with a plan to take down Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian, but it doesn’t go exactly as hoped.

Tony skips the last rung and lands on the hallway floor. Steve plants his feet in the hallway a moment later, and then they’re both running. “Get your shield. Meet me in the control room,” Tony calls, jumping down into another chute.

Halfway to his cabin, Steve passes three suits of Iron Man armor jogging in the opposite direction, presumably toward Tony and the control room. They move differently while empty than when Tony or Rhodes are inside them, and differently still from when JARVIS had controlled the suits. These seem just the slightest bit jerky, reminding Steve of the shuddering frames of old newsreels.

Sam’s across the hallway, suited up, when Steve emerges with his shield. “Not sure how helpful wings are going to be in space,” Sam says. “But better safe than sorry, I figure. Where to, Cap?”

“Control room.”

Now, each time Steve and Sam cross a threshold in the direction of the control room, a blast door closes over it and a forcefield flickers into place. When they arrive, everyone else is already there, surrounded by screens and holograms. A flash of nostalgia for the more familiar displays and holograms of the compound and Tony’s workshop in the tower is quickly overruled by the urgency of the situation.

There aren’t any armors to be seen, but before Steve can ask, Tony’s speaking. “It’s Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian.” Both dead in their previous timeline: one spaced by Tony and Peter, the other smashed by Bruce and Veronica, the Hulkbuster armor. Steve remembers how Nebula’s eyes had burned with a hard satisfaction when she’d heard that, and wishes they’d asked her for more information on the Black Order when they’d had the chance.

“Those doors won’t stop them,” Strange points out. Sure enough, there’s a video feed of Ebony Maw strolling, serene, solitary, down a hall of their ship, not breaking stride as a forcefield deactivates at his arrival and a blast door crushes itself into a ball a moment later. Cull Obsidian is at least slowing down a bit to heave his massive hammer into a wall panel. A glowing floor plan of the ship on one screen shows them approaching the control room from opposite directions.

“How’d they board us?” Natasha asks.

A hologram that had been displaying a stream of equations and three-dimensional graphs switches to show their ship, the torus-shaped craft of the Black Order hovering beside it. Their ship is pierced by two cylinders connected to the larger vessel. “There,” Bucky says, pointing at the cylinders. The display rewinds in a blur, then plays again, showing the massive tubes unfurling from the massive circular vessel into the Wakandan one. “Those things are at least ten feet wide on the inside. They just walked through them from their ship into ours.”

On the screens, Cull Obsidian is bludgeoning his way through his fourth blockade. Ebony Maw has been intercepted by two of the armors, and is peeling sheets of metal from the walls of the ship to hold them back.

“Does this ship have a self-destruct?” Steve asks.

“It wouldn’t destroy the Stone,” Bruce replies immediately.

“I’m not suggesting we blow up the ship with us on it,” Steve corrects. “Just them.”

“Can you get us onto their ship?” Tony looks at Strange, who nods.

Steve’s still watching Tony, who’s already tapping something on the displays in front of him. “Do you think you can fly that thing outta here?”

“I’ve already flown it,” Tony responds without looking up. “Don’t ask me to land it, but I can get us out of the blast radius no problem. How long do you need, Doc?”

Strange is already spinning a portal open and is waving Bruce, who’s closest to it, to walk through. “Fifteen seconds.”

Tony finishes his input and the numeral 15 is projected above the other holograms. Bucky and Natasha are through the glowing circle in less than two seconds, followed by Sam. The countdown is at 10. Then Tony’s clambering in, and Steve has to rein in the impulse to guide him through. The countdown is at 8 when Steve jumps through and Strange is behind him a moment later, slotting the portal closed like the spiral of a camera aperture.

The Black Order’s ship is dark, with blue-tinted stars streaking by through what might a window and might be a screen. There’s bulky equipment everywhere, seemingly built for someone much taller and larger than a human. Tony and Bruce are already knelt over some kind of console, pulling up silvery tables and charts.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” Tony says, and up comes a display showing the outside of the vessel they’re on. Cull Obsidian’s hammer is embedded in the hull. One of his hands is clutched around the handle, the other holding onto Ebony Maw. Panels and gates open are sliding open around them, no doubt from Maw’s telekinesis. It’s a lot like how Tony and Peter had gotten inside before, Steve thinks.

And now they’re in the same bind as when they were assembled in the control room a minute ago, except instead of being on a ship that they know well, they’re in enemy territory.

Bucky’s spotted movement and has his rifle trained on where they must be coming through, and Sam launches into the air toward the same spot, weaving through the platforms and scaffolding-like balconies that make up the curved structure of the ships interior. Strange is making a more straightforward vertical ascent with his cloak, spreading his arms and projecting fiery mandalas around his hands. Tony’s pulling some sort of cords attached to his arc reactor and the Iron Man suit is spreading over him even as he’s walking forward, expanding over his body. Steve wonders if Shuri had helped Tony with it; it reminds him of  the way T’Challa’s Black Panther suit manifests. It takes just seconds to finish, and then the repulsors whine into life and Tony’s rocketing after Sam and Strange.

“Checking internal weapons,” Natasha says, bending over the console Tony has just left.

“I miss Veronica,” Bruce moans quietly. He hasn’t stopped scrolling through the glowing data in front of him. Still no Hulk, then.

There’s a screeching, tearing sound. Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw have breached the room. After that, everything happens in double-time.

Sam and Bucky fire, but the bullets barely go a foot from their guns before they still and drop to the ground in a clatter. Chunks of equipment and pieces of ship are raining down on them—the flyers are dodging, Natasha’s tackled Bruce and rolled him away from a massive tangle of metal that’s crashed inches from where his head had just been, and Steve’s using all of his strength to hold up the platform that’s landed on the shield. Cull Obsidian reels his hammer back to him from where it’s just made a hit against a flared golden shield that Tony has conjured from his suit, and Strange is making a circle with one arm, creating another portal in the air in front of him. Bucky’s pushing up on the platform now too, and together they knock it to the side. It lands tilted against a pillar of buttons and switches. Steve uses it as a ramp, running up it to jump onto the next closest platform, that much closer to where the real fight is happening.

Except the pieces of the ship that Ebony Maw is peeling off the walls and swirling around them are bigger than before. A chunk the size of a small airplane is heading for Bucky. Before Steve has time to change his own trajectory, Tony’s swooping in to block it. He knocks it slightly off course but it’s still falling, taking him with it, and then he and Bucky are both pinned beneath it. Even as he’s climbing upward, Steve tries to calculate the weight of what’s just landed on Tony, and how much the suit can take for how long. He can’t contemplate what being caught under that thing has done to Bucky. The landing he just stepped off of is in the air now, swerving with the unnatural pull of telekinesis to hurdle toward where Natasha and Bruce are working. She throws herself onto Bruce, an arm locked over him as she pulls them under the partial shelter of the twisted metal they’d narrowly missed earlier; when the mass crashes over them, they at least aren’t immediately crushed.

The cyan light from the rush of stars surrounding them is harsh and cold, catching on motes of dust and casting a pallor of the drowned over any human skin it lands on. Cull Obsidian launches himself from his high vantage point to tackle Sam against one of the bulkheads. They’re still grappling as they fall down the curved wall, each trying to land a blow on the other, Sam angling the battered wings to try snag something and slow their descent. They’re not far from where Steve is now, and he’s scrambling up a pile of crushed bits of hull and bulkhead when the surface under his feet vanishes and he’s tumbling to the floor, a hail of metal slabs coming after him and pinning him. He has to fight to catch his breath and he can’t see Sam, or Strange—or anyone.  

But there’s a sparkling light behind his closed eyelids, and Steve opens them to see golden embers of magic glittering across the scraps of ship that are enclosing him. They’re growing brighter as they cover him, gradually at first, and then abruptly so bright he has to squeeze his eyes shut again against the flash.

Steve opens his eyes and he’s on the quinjet. Sam’s in the pilot seat. He lets go of the controls in surprise for a moment, then grabs them again. “Uh, did we just time travel?”

“Is this what happened to you before?” Natasha turns to Steve. She’s strapped into a seat beside him. Steve’s pocket buzzes.

“More or less,” Steve forces out, reeling. He pulls the flip phone out of his pocket, opens it.

“Strange did something,” Sam says. It’s nearly a question.

“It’s a little disconcerting,” Natasha says, not looking in the least disconcerted. “But better than being crushed by scrap metal.”

“Could’ve used some warning,” Sam complains.

The phone is still set to Switzerland time. 1:48 PM, 1 unread message, the screen tells him. Less than an hour after the last time he’d been snapped into the past by the Time Stone. And this time, Natasha and Sam remember too.

 

 **Tony:** _go straight to Wakanda, we’ll wizard portal there. same basic plan as last time_

 **Steve:** _what will be different this time?_

 **Tony:** _bit more of a head start. gotta count for something.  
_ **Tony:** _Bruce and I got a look at how they tracked us_

 **Steve:** _can we stop them from doing it again?_

 **Tony:** _ask me again in a few hours._

 

It isn’t long before the jet reaches Wakanda, and Steve’s standing on the landing pad of the palace for the third time in what feels like five days. This time, it’s not just himself, Tony, and the sorcerers who remember the previous loop, but everyone who was on the ships with them. The Black Order hadn’t come after the Mind Stone yet, but when Wong noticed Strange resetting time again, he’d been able to preserve the memories of everyone with him, the way he had for Steve and Tony back at the sanctum.

They’ve finished exchanging tech and information—Tony, Bruce, Rhodey, Strange, and Wong have spent the few hours left in separating Vision from the Mind Stone going over everything they gleaned from the data on the Black Order’s ship—so Steve has no good reason to linger. But Tony had been talking with Shuri, seemingly torn between telling her off for helping Peter onboard last time and unloading as much data as possible about how they’d been tracked, when he was interrupted by a phone call.

“Honey,” Tony says into the slender rectangle against his ear, spinning on his heel to turn away from the remaining crowd. “Yeah, I—no. I’m sorry. I—” Steve can’t listen to this. God, what is he doing? The last thing Tony would want is for Steve to overhear this. He’s backing away, making for the ramp, and can’t help but catch, “That’s not—I have to—I’m sorry—”

Steve has the shield again; Tony had passed it to him without explanation, not long after the quinjet landed, and then turned to talk to Vision before Steve could say anything. This time, when he unpacks, he slings the shield onto his back, so it’s with him when he heads to Sam’s room to see if his wings still need a once-over. They pass a couple hours that way, in the room where the escape pod was—no, _is_ , because Peter hasn’t come on board this time. Sam’s clearly making an effort to keep the topic light, telling a story about a 4th of July barbecue, speculating on Bucky and Natasha holding hands, describing his first flight with Riley. Steve can’t stop thinking about how the last loop ended, though, about how it could have gone differently.

Bruce’s head pops over the top of a nearby chute. “We’re, uh, taking a dinner break. Lunch break? Anyway. Wanna join?”

Steve and Sam follow Bruce to the mess hall, Bruce explaining the progress he, Strange, and Tony have been making since the ship launched. After Tony ensured Peter wasn’t onboard or about to arrive, the three of them returned to the data they’d managed to reconstruct from the Black Order’s ship. They have the start of an idea of how to shield the Stone from being tracked—Bruce is saying something about thera-magnetic wave signatures—and Bruce found something he thinks they can use to contact Thor.

Tony and Strange are seated across from each other in a table alcove, their heads bent over a tablet. The brilliant blue of Tony’s hologram is countered by a disc of golden symbols Strange is pulling into being, both casting beams of light onto their plates of food. Bucky and Natasha are next to each other in another nook, eating the same mashed whatever-it-is they’d had during the last loop. “Space food,” Bruce says apologetically, making a short gesture toward the counter of partially opened packages.

Steve assumes that Bruce would rejoin Tony and Strange, but when he suggests it, Bruce shakes his head and fiddles with his glasses, saying, “Nah, I need a break from all that. Wanna fill me in on some of what I missed?” So Steve and Sam tell Bruce about the events after the battle in Sokovia, though by unspoken agreement nothing is mentioned about Lagos or anything that happened after that day.

The meal winds down to Sam retelling one of Rhodes’ War Machine stories. Bruce and Strange leave first, conferring with each other about quantum bubbles and passive sensors. When Tony leaves soon after, Steve excuses himself and follows him.

“What now, Rogers?” Tony demands, without looking at him or breaking his stride down the hallway.

“You tried to keep that chunk of metal from landing on Bucky,” Steve says.

“That’s the job.” Tony’s still looking straight ahead. “Not that I did so great at it.”

“I—thank you.” Steve’s not sure how his voice is so steady.

“I’m not doing it _for you_. I didn’t return the shield for _you_.” He can see Tony’s jaw twitch. “Not everything is about you.”

“Even asking me to be your best man?”

“Can you—it’s not a big deal,” Tony insists. They’ve reached a chute and Tony uses the opportunity to turn his back on Steve and start up a ladder.

“I kind of think it is,” Steve says, taking the ladder opposite him.

“You and Pepper, god, it’s just this idea I had—” Tony cuts himself off, stops climbing for a moment. Steve watches as Tony closes his eyes, swallows. “It’s not a big deal,” he repeats.

“Why didn’t you ask me earlier?” It’s easier than saying _Why didn’t you call me, why didn’t you reply to my letter, why did you barely respond to me when I tried to reach out to you_.

“It wasn’t the right time,” Tony grits out.

“And it is now?”

“It was holding up the wedding planning.”

“What?” Steve asks sharply. They hadn’t even been speaking to each other, when had Tony been planning on asking if none of this had happened?

“Well, I had to know if you were going to be there,” Tony says, like it’s obvious.

“That doesn’t explain why it’s the right time now.”

They’ve reached the top of the chute now, and Tony finally turns to face Steve, his expression rigid. “She broke things off, okay? She doesn’t remember, two days from now, after the first time—she didn’t want me to go, and I did anyway. I had to. I _had to_.”

“I know you did,” Steve says, because he does, of course he does.

“And she didn’t want me to go this morning, either. Not this time, not last time. At least _this_ time I could convince her I wasn’t trying to put off the wedding,” Tony adds, his mouth twisting like he’s tasting something sour.

“I’m sorry, Tony, I shouldn’t have—”

Tony pulls himself straighter, reminding Steve of a cat arching its back. “You’re sorry? You’re—stop trying to act like it’s fine between us, you’re terrible at it—”

Steve interrupts him. “I don’t know how else to _make_ it fine—”

“I don’t need—” Tony throws up his hands. The gesture looks broader, wilder, in the narrow corridor of the ship. “I have work to do, we still have to fix all this, it’s going to happen again, they’re all going to—”

“We’re going to fix it,” Steve insists, stepping closer to Tony. He’s barely sure what he’s referring to now. “We’re going to get it right.”

“Well maybe it would have gone the right way the _first time_ if we had done it ‘together’ like you—”

“What,” Steve barks. “And why _weren’t_ we, if that’s—”

Tony crosses his arms and glares, his voice rising. “If you’re suggesting that _I—”_

“You could have called me,” Steve finds himself yelling, not anything he ever meant to say out loud.

“You could have _been there—”_ Tony’s screaming at him, and Steve’s interrupting him, screaming back, he’s not even sure what he’s saying at this point. Even though they’re fighting, it’s a relief to be so _loud_ with Tony again. They’ve always been loud together, and lately, it’s been far too quiet.

Steve wants to laugh at that, and the idea of laughter is so ludicrous that it spills out of him, a harsh bark that has Tony nearly growling as he shoves Steve’s chest. “What’s so fucking funny?”

Still reeling from the shock of mirth, from feeling anything that isn’t slow and muted and despairing, Steve replies, “I thought everything was a joke to you, Stark.”

Tony stares at him, then takes a step away and repeats, “I have work to do. I suggest you go find some of your own.”

Steve lets him go. Following Tony’s suggestion, Steve goes to his cabin and reviews all of the ship’s capabilities. He’d memorized the layout after the last loop, but just the shared areas, so he goes over the schematics as well. When he’s hungry, he brings a few boxes of the Wakandan space rations to Bucky’s room, and they go over everything that happened during their last battle with the Black Order while they eat.

Steve wants to say something to Bucky, something to make up for not being able to say goodbye before Thanos’ victory that first time, something to say how glad he is that Bucky’s here with him—despite how it clearly drains and weighs on him, however he tries to cover it with smirks and sarcasm—something about how good it is to see him smile, even something teasing about how often that smile is directed at Natasha. But he doesn’t have the words for it.

Instead he goes back to his own cabin and practices using his tablet to control ships’ systems. When he exhausts that, he pulls up the data that Tony, Strange, and Bruce are working on and tries to make what he can of that. A significant portion of it is equations and designs for a device Tony thinks will be able to interface with the ship Thor, Rocket, and Groot are on by this time, but none of the schematics are complete. They have the start of a forcefield in place, something that’s partially based on the Wakandan ones and partially on Wanda’s magic and partially some kind of spell Strange has developed. The notes say it’s not blocking everything, but considering it’s now already several hours later than when the Black Order’s ship showed up the last time, it seems to be helping some.

Steve’s asleep when the ship’s alarm goes off. He’s on his feet and out his door in seconds, his shield on his back, tapping on his tablet even as he runs. Their ship is pinned again, and Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw are on board just as before. They’re slightly slowed down, maybe, by the changes to the forcefields that Shuri made, but that won’t buy them much time. Steve shuts down the lights to sections of the ship they’re on and switches the cameras to infrared. Cull Obsidian bellows and crashes blindly onward, while Ebony Maw is ripping the hallway apart indiscriminately, as if pulling it to pieces at random in hopes of opening a pathway to his prey.

Steve arrives in the control room. Strange, Bruce, Tony, and Natasha are already there, joined by the three empty Iron Man suits. “Nice job with the lights,” Natasha says. “What next?”

They’re working on a strategy when Sam and Bucky come in. Bucky has an idea for ambushing Ebony Maw and catching him with a bullet or two before he has time to react with his telekinesis.

It almost works. Then everything goes pretty much the same way it did the last time.

It’s not quite as fast, maybe.

Ebony Maw arrives first and Bucky and Sam manage to graze him a bit before a wall is coming at them, and then Cull Obsidian breaks through the other blast door and he has Natasha locked in some kind of massive metal claw and he’s tossing his hammer against the Iron Man suits that are all that’s keeping them from being crushed by half the contents of the room. Tony’s trying to draw Ebony Maw after him, toward where Strange is readying a portal into the vacuum of space, and the air in the room is dry and thick with static and the sound of rending metal is close to overwhelming.

When Steve notices the golden sparks crawling over him, the ceiling is already crashing down on him.

He’s back on the quinjet again, and his phone reads 2:36 PM.

They leave Wakanda 45 minutes earlier than they managed on the previous iteration, thanks to some information about Shuri’s success with Vision and the Mind Stone that Bruce has managed to relay in time to speed everything up. Tony and Strange assure them that the forcefield to hide the Stones is 23% stronger than last time, and now both ships are equipped with them.

This time when they sit in the mess hall for a meal break, all seven of them are sharing in a single conversation. Sam and Bruce are doing most of the heavy lifting of keeping it going—Bruce with Asgardian folktales he’s picked up and Sam with a debate he’s trying to start about the new Star Wars sequels versus the original trilogy—though Natasha chimes in to fill any silences before they stretch on too long. Strange barely replies to anything that doesn’t have to do with the Time Stone or protecting the ship, and Tony keeps his posture closed off, crossing his arms whenever he’s not eating, and only responding when he’s addressed directly. Sam asks at one point why they keep getting back to the past a little later than the previous loop, and Bruce launches into an explanation about pendulums and the amplitude of trajectories. “Unless an outside force acts on it, a pendulum isn’t going to swing any further in one direction than its starting point, or any further in the other direction than it goes on its first swing. Inertial forces act on it so that each full swing is shorter than the last one. The spell is like that, sort of, we’re going to keep snapping back but we can’t go outside of where we’ve already been.”

At that, Dr. Strange interrupts to explain all the ways this metaphor fails, and Steve watches Tony and Bruce share a small, wicked smile.

The Black Order find them two hours later than before. Steve shuts off the lights in the sections of the ship they’ve boarded, and this time he turns up the artificial gravity settings, too.

It buys them another hour.

Sam and Bucky are down—just unconscious, Steve thinks, but he had to watch them fall, and he’s not sure, and what if this is the last time—and Cull Obsidian’s hammer has just slammed against his shield and it might be too much weight for him to bear much longer. Ebony Maw has Tony and Natasha wrapped in slabs of metal. Every panel in sight has been torn from the walls, crumpled and piled and leaving the guts of the ship exposed and sparking. But that spark—that one’s different, Steve thinks as he crumples to the floor.

He’s sitting on the quinjet and his phone reads 3:12 PM.

It’s their fourth time leaving Wakanda with the Stones, their fifth time trying to stop Thanos.

Everyone is eating together in the ship’s mess hall and they’re going over what’s worked against the Black Order in previous loops and what hasn’t. Bruce is impressed by a time that Wong used a portal to slice of Cull Obsidian’s hand during the very first run, when they fought in Greenwich Village, and Strange is giving a pedantic rundown of how portals work and the restraints on them. He’s going over the calculations required to create a connection between two locations and how different it is to do that on Earth, which is spinning on its axis and traversing the sun and moving along with the rest of the solar system and so on, versus doing so on a disabled spaceship being dragged by a larger spaceship, when Tony interrupts him.

“You tried to use the Eye thing in Greenwich Village but Squidward stopped your hands before you could do anything. Why doesn’t he do that out here?”

Strange begins another explanation, this one largely about his own brilliance and how well he prepared the time loop spell back on Titan during their first run, so that now he only needs to “tug” on his prepared spell, give it some parameters, and then let it take over.

After the meal, Sam, Bucky, and Natasha all crowd into Steve’s cabin to play cards. No one thought to bring any, but they make it work with a holographic deck. It’s not as distracting Steve wants it to be; he longs to do something useful but can’t think of anything. He reminds himself to be grateful that Sam and Bucky are here, tries to appreciate the simple companionship, but he can’t forget what’s coming. A few hours into the game, Bucky and Natasha are paying less attention to the game and more to smirking at each other, so when the hand is over Steve calls it a night.

It takes an additional three hours for the Black Order to reach their ship. They try flooding the sections that have been boarded with poisonous gas, but it just enrages Cull Obsidian, and Ebony Maw pushes it back into the vents. When they reach the control room, Tony, Sam, and the Iron Man suits swarm Cull Obsidian and have one of his shoulders pinned against a bulkhead and are close to disarming him when Ebony Maw lifts the floor out from under them and on the other side of Steve’s shield something is on fire and someone is screaming, and then the golden shards of the time spell are crawling over him and he closes his eyes and waits to snap back to the past, wondering how many more chances they have left.

It’s 3:56 PM Swiss time when Steve opens his eyes. Even as they’re buying themselves more time in one direction by perfecting the forcefield and finding a way to contact Thor and refining a plan to take down the Black Order, the loops are giving them less control. It’s only a few more iterations before they’ll reach an equilibrium point where they can’t go backward any further. How many more iterations do they have? If Dr. Strange knows how many tries they have, he hasn’t mentioned it to anyone.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone on the spaceship figures out how to get along with each other despite their history and some missteps. A fight against Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw finally goes differently than before.

Steve makes his way to the mess hall not long after he gets on board and starts going through their provisions. There’s enough to last them weeks, more if they ration it. He finds a french press and sets to making coffee, thinking he can bring it to Tony, Bruce, and Dr. Strange. It seems the least he can do, since they’re the ones actually working to help the situation. The grounds are steeping when he remembers that Bruce doesn’t drink coffee, and he has no idea what Strange prefers; he’s really only making coffee for Tony, the way he used to when the team lived together. Steve has the idea that Tony wouldn’t appreciate that right now, and he isn’t sure he wants to deal with what Bruce and Strange might make of it either, so he fills a teapot with hot water, stacks some tea bags and mugs beside the coffee, and sets out with a full tray.

The drinks are well-received—if distractedly so—and Steve dawdles to watch them work. Strange has several leather-bound books out and is absent-mindedly writing notes in the air with one finger. Tony’s waving his hands over a series of tablets, kimoyo beads, and holograms while Bruce looks on, cradling his mug of tea. Steve gathers that Wong and Rhodes have been doing their own work on the problems of shielding the Stone and contacting Thor during their own time loops, and Bruce is working to reconcile all of the information together. At one point, Strange finds a passage he thinks will be of particular use to Bruce, and makes a series of angular hand gestures over the open book. A translucent copy of the open page rises out of it as he lifts his hands, then shoots into the cloud of holograms on Tony and Bruce’s side of the table, taking on the bluish glow of the other images. Bruce looks shocked for a moment, then stares down at where he’s twisting his glasses in his lap and returns to work. Tony mutters, “I hate magic,” but keeps glancing back at Strange’s book like he’s trying to figure something out. Sure enough, a few minutes later asks Strange if he could turn any text into digital form and if it works the other way too.

When they head out to join the others for a meal, Steve hangs back, and blocks the doorway to keep Tony behind with him.

“Seriously, Rogers, these time loops don’t exist so that you can unload your shit on me,” Tony says, crossing his arms.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t use them to talk to you,” Steve insists. “We’re here, after all.”

“Very Zen of you.”

“I got the idea that you still—want to be friends. Since you asked me to be in your wedding and all.” Steve swallows. “Am I wrong?”

“Okay, fine, whatever. What is it this time?”

Steve clenches his jaw and plows onward. Tony’s distance and dismissals hurt all the more for being no more than he deserves. “I wanted to—I haven’t apologized. In person. For not telling you about your parents. And I wanted to. So—I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Apology accepted.” Tony moves for the door.

“Wait, I—” Steve grabs for his arm, but Tony slaps it away. It hurts, being reminded that he can’t even touch him casually like that any more. “Just like that?”

“I’m not going to apologize to _you_ any time soon, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Tony snaps. But he’s not trying to leave again.

“No, I’m not asking for that. But I didn’t hear from you, so I thought. I don’t know what I thought.”

“Well, I was busy. Working on my shit, if you must know. Used that prototype to poke at my own hippocampus for a while. Talked to a few experts. Figured out some things. Moved on.” Tony shrugs a little.

“I know we’re never going to agree on the Accords—”

Tony interrupts before he’s finished getting the word out. “I don’t want to talk about the Accords—”

“Then let’s not,” Steve says firmly. They matter less than ever, now. “Thank you.”

Tony rolls his eyes, raises his arm and then jerks it back in an abortive gesture, as if he was going to pat Steve on the shoulder and then thinks better of it. “Let’s go join the others.”

The conversation in the mess hall is a little smoother than the last time, though it’s still Sam—and less confidently, Bruce—doing most of the talking. Strange remains fixed to his stack of books, occasionally shooting pointed glares at anyone who laughs too loudly for his liking.

Bruce is stumbling his way through a story about accidentally causing a factory reset on some lab equipment and then being stuck trying to fix it while all of the commands were in French and the displays showed imperial units instead of metric, alternately gesturing and fiddling with his hands, occasionally speaking more into his lap than to the room at large but plowing onward.

“Lemme tell you, I do not miss having a factory reset for my brain,” Bucky says.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Natasha hisses, smacking him tenderly across the cheek. He bats her hand away with a grin.

“Please,” Steve chuckles. “You’re going to miss having an excuse the next time you act like a dumbass.”

“Could you not?” Tony snaps.

Steve finds himself wishing he could initiate a time reset _right now_. Or somehow erase the last 10 seconds from everyone else’s memory.

“Hey,” Natasha says softly, reaching to place a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “It’s not about that.”

Sam looks between them. “Wow Nat, don’t you ever get tired of performing all the emotional labor for these guys?”

The ends of Natasha’s lips peek upward, and Bruce laughs with his whole head and shoulders.

“I think that’s selling yourself short,” Steve says, aiming to keep his tone light. “If you weren’t here we’d all be sitting here not saying a word or looking each other in the eye.”

“Might be better than putting a foot in my mouth,” Bucky mutters.

“Processing through humor can just be kinda hit-or-miss,” Sam reassures Bucky. “You got something to get off your chest?” he asks Tony.

Tony crosses his arms, shaking off Natasha’s hand, and he glares around the room, only looking at Bucky out of the corner of his eyes. “Maybe we just wouldn’t bother talking to each other because it doesn’t do any goddamn good.”

“I don’t think it’s too bad,” Steve says, peering up at Tony through his creased brow.

“Sure,” Tony scoffs. “You tried to tell me about Zemo, I didn’t listen. I tried to tell you Ross was trying to kill all of you, you didn’t listen. That went _exquisitely_.”

“None of us were at our best,” Natasha says.

“And he didn’t kill us,” Sam points out. “And you listened when it mattered.”

Tony shakes his head but his frown is softening. “Wasn’t really soon enough.”

“And here I thought the avoidance and testosterone were bad enough; now it’s all _sentiment_.” Strange rolls his eyes, snaps his book shut and gets to his feet. “I’ll be in the lab doing actual work, if anyone wants to join me.”

As he sweeps out of the room, Steve could swear his cloak shrugs at them, as if to say, _sorry he’s like this, what am I supposed to do about it_.  

Tony eyes the doorway as Strange’s footsteps fade out of earshot. “Is he hoping to unite us all in finding him insufferable?”

“Well, it’s working on me,” Steve volunteers.

“See, you boys agree on plenty,” Natasha says.

“Can we also agree that this food tastes like cardboard?” Bucky asks.

“It’s better than K-rations.” Steve says. "Barely.”

“What’s good Wakandan food like, anyway?” Tony asks, picking at the plate in front of him.

The topic of Wakandan cuisine lasts them through the rest of the meal. When it’s over, Natasha invites Steve to a game of chess, and he follows her to her cabin. It’s nearly indistinguishable from his own, other than the way the outside wall curves into the rest of the ship.

“So,” Natasha says as they set the pieces in their places on the board. “You and Stark. How’s that going?”

“C’mon Nat, haven’t you done enough ‘emotional labor’ for one day?” Steve teases. It’s true that she and Sam and Bruce have been smoothing things over, taking on the work of keeping the team from each other’s throats, while Steve, who bears the actual responsibility, has been been blundering on, not saying enough when he should, saying the wrong thing when he bothers to open his mouth. She deserves a break from navigating the mess Steve made. But he doesn’t know what to say about it right now, and he can’t bear to hear her reassure him that it’s going to work out—or, knowing Nat, to be bluntly honest and remind him all the ways he’s fucked up his friendship with Tony beyond repair.

She smirks. “What else do you want to talk about?”

“Wanna tell me about you and Bucky?”

The smile playing on her lips slips, changes into something else—Steve isn’t sure what—and her eyes flash at him across the table. “You wanna talk about my past.” It’s not something she’s discussed much, but ever since SHIELD fell, she’s been letting more and more of herself become visible.

“If you’re up to it,” Steve replies. He lifts a pawn. “You want white?”

“Black, always,” she says, angling the board so the black pieces are in front of her. “Well. I told you about Iran?”

“A little.”

She tells it again, this time in greater detail. He hadn’t known that Bucky’s conditioning had worn off before. Of course, he hadn’t known that he and Natasha had been together before, either. She sounds fond, he thinks, as she describes a run-in with an arms dealer they’d had before Hydra caught up with him again. Steve wonders, sometimes, if this Natasha, the one he thinks of as his friend, is a role for her like all her others. If she has any part of her left that isn’t a role of one kind or another.

He hopes she’s found that part of her with Bucky.

They play a couple matches before the door slides open and Bucky himself comes in. When his eyes catch on Steve, his expression goes from sheepish to feral in a split second. “You making time with my girl, punk?”

“Oh, I showed her a great time,” Steve answers with a smile, getting up. “G’night, you two. Nat was about to beat me, anyway.”

Steve’s dozing in his cabin when the ship’s proximity alarm goes off. The Black Order is only ninety minutes later than the previous loop.

They’re running out of new strategies to try. This time, instead of all staying in the control room, they leave Strange and Bruce there to monitor and intervene as they can—Strange casting spells from a distance while Bruce runs interference with blast doors, gravity levels, and light settings—while the rest of them split up to slow down Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw separately. Steve’s on a team with Tony, Natasha, and one of the empty Iron Man armors, while Sam, Bucky, and the other two unmanned suits head toward Cull Obsidian. Tony uses the empty armor as a decoy, which works for a few minutes, the suit twirling and dodging the detritus already being hurled in their direction—and then Ebony Maw peels it open like it’s ripe fruit.

Seeing it bent and split and falling makes Steve’s stomach churn, even knowing that there’s no one inside, nothing at all beyond the tangled wires of the suit’s unfinished electronic innards. But there’s no to dwell—a torn-off door is speeding toward them, and Steve steps in to deflect it with his shield. Natasha jumps up and uses the chunk of metal coming at her as a step to propel herself still higher, firing her widow’s bites. She times her jump so that they discharge just as Tony swoops down and reflects a repulsor blast off Steve’s shield at Ebony Maw’s face, and for a moment Steve thinks it might be too much for his powers to swat away, but then the ceiling and the walls are coming toward him. The air feels thin.

He doesn’t see the whole spell this time, only feels the golden embers crawling up his body. He closes his eyes against the white flash.

It’s not too much later than the last time the loop reset—just twenty minutes. It’s 4:16 PM and they’re nearly to Wakanda. When the next loop starts, the ship will probably be well on its way in hyperspace.

They’re on the palace landing pad and everyone is saying their goodbyes when Rhodes takes Steve by the arm. “So. I hear you and Tony have been patching things up.”

“I hope so,” Steve says, looking Rhodes up and down. “Is this where you tell me I better watch my back or I’ll have to answer to you?”

Rhodes shakes his head. “Lemme give you a little tip about Tony. That right there, suggesting he can’t fight his own battles? That’s a great way to run him off.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I’m still not crazy about how you handled things. He probably isn’t, too. But you’re alright.”

“I appreciate that,” Steve says, and he does.

“I dunno if you wanna hear this, but I do get where you were coming from.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. My best friend was kidnapped by terrorists too, y’know,” Rhodes says evenly.

“Afghanistan.”

“Yep. Did you know I was in the convoy with him when they hit it? Didn’t do a thing to help.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Steve insists.

Rhodes dismisses this with another shake of his head. “I bet you heard it wasn’t your fault either, how much did that help?” Steve doesn’t have much he can say to that. “It’s not the same, but he came back a different guy, too. And then the government wanted a piece of him, and weren’t exactly thrilled when he refused. So, I’m just saying, Tones and your man Bucky, they might have more in common than you give them credit for.”

Steve’s still thinking on that when he sits in the ship’s mess hall hours later, observing as Sam and Bruce lead everyone else in a conversation about their worst commercial airline experiences. Natasha chimes in with a story about traveling inside a suitcase in a cargo hold for a mission, and urges Tony to join in by reminding him of some incident on his private jet when she was acting as his PA. Steve has plenty of airplane stories from the war, and decides to tell one even though it features Bucky prominently. Natasha sends him a small, encouraging smile, and Bucky takes up the story when Steve forgets a detail he deems crucial. Tony doesn’t shut down or snap or leave the room—in fact, he barely seems to be avoiding Steve’s eyes while he’s speaking—so that’s something, at least.

When Steve wakes up in his cabin, he’s confused at first as to why the ship’s alarm isn’t going off. It’s an hour later than the last time the Black Order arrived, and his first time sleeping on the ship that he’s awakened naturally—or to anything other than the proximity alert. That isn’t as much of a relief as it should be, though, given the dream he just left. It’s not a nightmare, not really. He’d been standing in front of a huge piece of paper pinned to a wall, trying to erase a giant, tangled pencil drawing that covered it from edge to edge. All he had was the eraser at the end of a pencil, and the rubber shavings stuck under his fingernails. He couldn’t back up to see the whole image, all he could do was chip away at one tiny section at a time. The lines of graphite were fading, the fibers of paper tearing away where he’d rubbed it raw with the little pink eraser. He was scratching at the paper with the stump of the pencil now, tearing it. Blood trickled from the wall wherever he pierced it with the pencil, and his lungs filled with dust. He woke up coughing.

With no aliens to fight, Steve pulls on a sweater, then his shield, and makes his way to the mess hall. The lights throughout the ship are dimmed for ship’s night.

Bucky is there, looking very small curled up in an alcove alone. “How ya doin’, Buck,” Steve says, heading to the counter to boil some water.

“Peachy,” Bucky grunts. “You?”

“Never better,” Steve replies easily.

With Bucky, the hush feels soft and peaceful, rather than strained and meaningful. Steve used to be able to share silences like this with Tony, loose and pleasant silences. Stretches of quiet stemming from familiarity and ease instead of the never-ending simmering of Steve’s guilt. When it was a facet of their familiarity—like now, sitting beside Bucky, in the stillness of the mess hall—rather than a reflection of how broken they are.

They’re sitting in the alcove together, drinking coffee in near silence, settling into the precious moment of comfort and rightness, when the blare of the alarm fills the room.

It’s finally better this time.

Three unmanned armors have swarmed Cull Obsidian on one side, while Strange has the other snared in a rope of sparking golden light and Natasha spins and swerves through an obstacle course of huge, inhuman limbs, soaring and darting in effortless, compass-perfect arcs. Cull Obsidian’s howls of rage and frustration are loud enough to hear from the control room on other end of the ship and two levels away. He snatches at where Natasha had just been, growls when he gets a handful of air and a few strands of blonde hair; she pivots on one leg, spiraling between his arms like a ballerina performing a leaping _fouetté_. He keeps trying to slap the suits away with one, still-bound arm, and lasso her with the other as she spikes him through the chest with a Wakandan spear. He’s roaring, twisting around where he’s been skewered, grasping at his weapon, but they have him held fast now. Nat’s pinned him in a corner—the tip of the spear grating against the wall panel in a screech of one vibranium alloy against another—but he’s regaining momentum, tossing one of the empty suits against a wall as he staggers upward.

From the safety of the control room, Steve watches the armor crack open under Cull Obsidian’s fist and has to stamp down on the instinctive panic. _Tony’s not in there_ , he reminds himself, and as if in answer to his thoughts, he feels Tony wince beside him as the hologram before them shows the plates of armor tumble to the ground. Strange has used Cull Obsidian’s distraction to open a portal just over the floor. Nat and the two undamaged suits are shoving him toward it, and with a flare of energy from the jet boots, finally tip him into the portal. It spirals shut, slicing a fragment of his protean weapon clean off.

Nat, Strange, and the two undamaged suits are back in the control room with everyone else before Ebony Maw has reached it.

The plan is for them all to corner him in the biggest, emptiest space they have, and come in all at once to overwhelm him: Tony fires one huge blast from his chest and another from the convergence of four arced panels that have unfurled from the back of his suit; Natasha tackles him through a portal Strange has made on one side of Ebony Maw, while Sam and Bucky shoot at him through two others; Steve and the unmanned armors jump in to block and counter the debris that he’s already tossing their way as soon as they enter the room. After so many runs of this fight, they all have a sense of how Strange and the portals work: how to time launching yourself through, attacking, passing through another portal, and landing back in the place you started, in a single arc of movement. Steve has a feel for what objects are going to be thrown their way next, and when. And they all know the ship now; it’s their turf, and they’ve already had some version of this battle here, in this space, five times before, while it’s their enemy’s first time seeing it.

It’s Natasha that does it. She springs from a compact, crouching position to an upright one and piercing Ebony Maw with a knife so long and slender it more closely resembles an ice pick.

Ebony Maw buckles, softly, like a clump of fabric. The sound of all the hovering metal as it clatters to the floor is disconcertingly loud and jangling compared to the way his body softly falls, crumples, in a pile.

Tony walks up to the corpse and nudges it with his foot. There’s no response. “So long, Voldemort.”

“Those movies ruined Fiennes in _The English Patient_ for me,” Sam grumbles, his wings slotting shut.

“Nah, that movie works way better if you read it as Almásy being a manipulative sociopath,” Tony replies, his eyes trailing the armors as they carry Ebony Maw’s still form toward an airlock.

“If you’re quite finished,” Strange says.

After a debrief that’s somehow both quick and bleary, Sam, Strange, and Bruce, excuse themselves to return to bed. Steve knows he won’t be getting back to sleep any time soon, though, and Bucky and Natasha join him in righting things around the ship and patching up what they can.

They’re soon rejoined by Tony, who’s wearing the glasses that connect him to Friday, trailed by the remaining unmanned armors. His hair is damp, he’s changed into sweatpants and a hoodie, and he has a toolbox under one arm. For a moment, it’s like Tony’s just wandered into the shared kitchen of Avengers’ tower during an inventing binge, looking for coffee and companionship, and Steve registers an abrupt pang of longing and nostalgia—before he takes in the gauntness in Tony’s face, a bone-deep exhaustion greater than simple insomnia, is reminded of all the ways nothing is the same.

“New armors, Stark?” Natasha asks from where she’s sorting through the rubble.

“Rushed them through fabrication them this morning,” Tony replies. One of the suits is holding something in place while he solders it together. “Whenever that was.”

Steve and Bucky are flattening out a bent wall panel and trying to set it back in place. The silence is stretching on too long, but Steve doesn’t know how to end it.

Natasha tries again. “He really did a number on the ship,” she observes.

“How’d he get those Matrix powers, anyway?” Tony grumbles.

“Does that make you Agent Smith?” Natasha teases.

“Hell no, I’m much more handsome than that guy,” Tony says, a slight smile starting to make its way across his face.

Steve silently agrees. Out loud, he says, “Sam made me watch those movies.”

“Any good?” Bucky asks, using his metal arm to beat the dents out of a metal piece of the ship.

“What I wanna know is, why does everyone assume robots are going to be evil?” Steve asks. “Most of the robots I’ve met have been okay people.”

Tony has a lot to say about that, of course. He’s more animated now, gesturing with his soldering iron, eyes twinkling. Natasha keeps him going with questions and pop culture references when appropriate, and Steve relaxes into the work. They all do, he thinks, or maybe hopes—even while they’re circling around the subject of Ultron. Though now the topic has drifted to Alan Turing, then to the Terminator movies and from there to Schwarzenegger’s stint in politics.

By the time Tony is telling a story about meeting the then-governor of California at a gala, Natasha isn’t bothering to hide her yawns or the lingering looks she shares with Bucky. It isn’t long before they both say their goodnights, leaving Steve alone in the room with Tony and the suits.

“That’s about all we can do here for now,” Tony says, and Steve thinks he’s making an excuse so they don’t have to be alone together, when Tony adds, “Wanna start on the hallways?”

Steve is pleasantly surprised again when Tony keeps his chatter going. He starts describing a journal article he read about light-sheet fluorescence microscopy and its future in the medical field. Steve can’t stop the dopey, incongruous smile that spreading across his face, so he angles himself behind the wall interface Tony is working on. He can’t believe how much he missed this, how much he hadn’t thought he’d have this again. Not just the rambling explications, or even the comfortable companionship, but the confidence and ease in Tony’s body as he speaks. That’s what he’d craved the most, Steve realizes: Tony’s intensity, his spark, open and gesturing with his hands, clanging pieces of metal together with focus and determination, illuminated by an inner force brighter than the arc reactor in his chest. The Tony he’s seen in the recent days has been closed, dimmed, harsh.

Not that the Tony he’s with now isn’t clouded by the events that brought them out here. He’s not as expansive as he used to be, and Steve notices how often Tony stops his work to massage his left arm, wincing in pain. When he’s describing a  recombinant protein extracted from the milk of transgenic goats, comparing it to spider-silk, he starts launching into a boast about Peter and the webbing fluid he created, then abruptly cuts himself off and switches to a discussion of deep-sea oceanography instead.

Then he stops himself on that topic too, peeks behind the panel to peer at Steve. “Shit, I don’t have to talk about underwater stuff, I wasn’t thinking. I can stop?”

Steve’s so wrong-footed by the consideration that it takes him a moment to even understand what Tony’s referring to. Of course, right. The time he crashed into the Atlantic and thought he was going to drown, and then woke up and everyone he knew was dead or dying. That. “I can handle hearing about some pelagic sea snails.” He doesn’t bother hiding his smile now. The thoughtfulness feels undeserved, after everything, and Tony’s tossing it out there with no fanfare. “Thanks.”

Tony’s still gushing about the impact of new research into the feeding habits of mucous-mesh grazers when Bruce arrives, looking like he wandered in by accident, but carrying a tray of coffee and toast. “Have you two been at this all night?”

“What’s night, out here,” Tony says with a broad shrug, snagging a piece of toast and taking an eager bite. Breadcrumbs catch in his beard, and Steve finds himself wondering what it would be like to kiss him, if he would taste like coffee or metal or something else, what that beard would feel like pressed against Steve’s face.

Not a fruitful line of thought. Not something that can happen. Steve shakes it off. “I think I’ll go try to catch some shuteye now, actually,” he says. “Good talking to you Tony. G’night, Bruce.”  

Back in his cabin, he sits in the alcove of his bed, holding the shield in his lap. Maybe it does mean what he wants it to mean. Maybe Tony doesn’t hate him any more. Or not entirely.

And Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw are gone. They’ve made it further this time than before. Maybe they can actually fix things. The thought had barely occurred to him before. He’d been fighting, yes, but because that was the only thing he could do. He’d had hope, but it had been a distant, dull thing, abstract and incomplete. A hope for a good death, to make the best of the worst situation he can imagine, a chance to say goodbye to the people he cares for. Now that spark of hope has ignited. For a moment, he imagines a future where the fighting is over. Maybe Bucky goes back to his plot of land, his goats. Or all the way back to Brooklyn. Maybe Natasha goes with him. They’re safe, Sam is safe, T’Challa and Wanda, maybe they’ll all make it.

Maybe at the end of it, Steve can go home to the compound. And maybe Tony will be there too.

He falls asleep like that, cradling the shield in his arms.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A spaceship battle doesn’t go as well as hoped. Steve and Tony talk about Siberia--pretty calmly, all things considered. A discussion of Star Wars turns out to be very inspiring. Bruce and Tony complete their communication device and reach their allies, but they get a reply they aren’t expecting, as well.

When the ship’s alarm awakens him, it takes Steve a moment to place where he is, when he is. For a wild moment he thinks he’s traveled back in time and they’re about to battle Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw  _ again _ , that he’s caught in a Nietzschean eternal return. But it doesn’t stop him from jumping to his feet, grabbing his shield, and heading toward the control room. 

Then a harsh, discordant noise fills the corridor, making the walls and floors tremble. The alarm stutters for a beat, and the sound clangs through the ship once more—a rough burst in the form of a rasping, clanking strike, and for a moment he’s reminded of the clash of vibranium on gold-titanium alloy. 

He has his tablet out before the sound hits again, somehow keeping his feet under him as he runs and reads and the whole hallway shudders and creaks. Another ship is firing some kind of energy weapon at them, and the tablet’s rundown of the ship’s systems shows that their engines were the first hit, knocking them out of hyperspace.

When he reaches the control room, Bucky and Natasha are sitting back to back, using a combination of joysticks and holograms to aim what firepower they have at the other spacecraft. It’s another round, torus-shaped ship, like what brought Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian, though it’s even larger than that one. Tony’s in another seat with a different type of hologram surrounding him, which he’s using to steer the ship and try to avoid the blasts coming at them. 

“We can’t take another one of these hits,” Bruce says. The display in front of him is showing the state of their shields, which Steve knows from careful study were made to protect them from gunfire, repulsors, anti-aircraft missiles, and then modified to help block the Time Gem from detection—not to repel whatever this alien craft is firing at them. 

“There more of those guns?” Steve asks. 

Bucky shakes his head grimly before Steve even finishes his sentence. 

“We’re not making a dent in their shielding, anyway,” Natasha replies through clenched teeth. Sure enough, on the the display in front of her the barrage of beams from their ship are dissipating harmlessly across the hull of the other craft. 

“I’m working on it,” Strange snaps. Steve hadn’t noticed him before; the gilded mandalas emanating from him are obscured by the holographic projections, an array of 3-D images showing their ship taking a beating in multiple sizes and angles all over the room. 

Steve hovers helplessly in the doorway, going over all the data on his tablet for what feels like the hundredth time. A moment later, Sam is at his side, saying softly, “So, not a situation that can be fixed with punching or running?” 

“You want to board their ship and take on Corvus Glaive, Proxima Midnight, and an army of Outriders with your shield and wings, be my guest,” Strange snarls. “In the meantime—”

“Shit,” Tony yells. “Incoming—” 

There isn’t time to reply, or brace, to inhale or exhale—to do anything. The cacophony is earsplitting and simultaneous with the far wall of the room ripping open and weightlessness taking over. It is, Steve’s brain dully registers, a lot like drowning. As complete and encompassing as the abrupt, frigid cold is, a barrage of other sensations overwhelms it: his skin tingles, his joints ache to a depth he hadn’t previously thought possible, he can’t move or breathe or think. Darkness and stars kaleidoscope across his blurry vision and he can feel that he’s about to blackout—

When time resets, he’s not expecting it. Less than fifteen seconds could have passed between Tony’s warning and Steve opening his eyes to his present location. He’s back in a chute on the ship, and he doesn’t know if he’d been ascending or descending. It takes him a moment to realize that Tony is on the other ladder, equally jostled by the change of scenery—except he doesn’t have superhuman reflexes. He’s lost his footing and is slipping down the rungs. Steve releases his grip, slides down the remaining distance to the bottom of the ladder, and uses the momentum of his landing to reach for Tony in one motion. 

Tony jerks, recoiling from Steve’s hand. It’s for less than a second, but Steve catches the wildness in his eyes, finds the same fear that had been there when Steve brought his shield down on the arc reactor in Siberia. 

Steve backs up so fast he hits his back on the ladder. “I’m sorry,” he says immediately. He wants to say it over and over again, scream it maybe, whisper it, find a way to make it mean something. Things have been getting better, fits and starts of improvement, but they’re not the same. Maybe they never will be. 

Tony’s already pulling himself up, scowling—but not looking frightened any more. Instead he’s chagrined, determined. This is what Tony was holding back from him, Steve thinks. He hadn’t wanted Steve to know that he was afraid of him. 

So Steve tries to pretend he doesn’t notice. He’s never been very good at that sort of thing. What comes out is an awkward, “What time is it? I mean, how long have we been on the ship?” 

Tony looks at a gadget on his wrist that doesn’t resemble any watch Steve has ever laid eyes on. “The ship left Wakanda less than an hour ago.” His face is nearly blank, but his eyes are moving too fast. 

“Are you okay?” Steve can’t not ask, somehow, even though it’s unwelcome, even though he knows what Tony’s going to say. 

“I’m fine,” Tony snaps, exactly as Steve expected him too. At times, having so much extra time with Tony during these loops has felt like a gift, a chance to talk to him where Tony can’t avoid him, still has a reason to try to work together; at others, it feels like he has to start over with Tony as much as with their mission, as if each flare of Strange’s spell has reset them back to the anger and distance of the last two years. 

“We just got launched into the vacuum of space, if you’re—” 

“Well, Strange has Groundhog-Day-ed us all again, so it doesn’t matter now.” 

“I think it matters, it was just a couple minutes ago—”

“It didn’t matter when it was you trying to kill me,” Tony snaps. His eyes flash up to meet Steve’s, then dart away. He clenches and unclenches a fist, staring at it, then moves his hands to his pockets. 

Steve fights the impulse to grab one of Tony’s hands, hold onto him, anchor Tony to him. He wants to comfort him, but knows it would have the opposite effect. He can’t stop pushing, why can’t he stop pushing? They’d been speaking so easily, while they repaired the ship together, comfortable in their victory over Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw. He should be content with that, instead of prodding his way into Tony’s space, reaching for him when he’s only just begun to stand being in the same room together. “I wasn’t trying to kill you,” he says instead. His tongue feels thick, too heavy. “God, Tony. I just wanted to stop you.” 

Tony looks up at him, his gaze jagged, pointed. “Really?” 

“Really.” He’s careful to keep his voice level. Tony said he’d forgiven him, or at least accepted his apology, wanted to move forward—but he’d spent all this time thinking Steve had wanted him dead? 

“I’m sorry I tried to hurt him.” Tony swallows, looks away. 

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I’m so sorry—”

“You’ve said.” 

“I feel like I need to keep saying it.” 

“Well. You should have told me.” 

“I should have,” Steve agrees. “I’m sorry I—hurt you.” He means physically, beating him with his shield, breaking the arc reactor, but now that it’s comes out of his mouth he tastes the ambiguity of it. 

Tony jerks back for a moment. His hands startle out of his pockets and he stares at them for a moment before he recovers. 

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Steve continues. Saying it feels more urgent than ever, with the memory of being about to suffocate in the cold, empty void barely receding. “I shouldn’t have put you in that situation in the first place, by keeping things from you, and then—”

“I’d kept things from you, too.” 

“It’s not the same, and I still shouldn’t have done that to you, if I could do it again—”

“Don’t.” 

“Don’t what?” 

“Don’t bullshit me, Rogers,” Tony says, and this time it’s Steve who flinches. 

_ Don’t bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know? _

_ Yes. _

Tony’s still talking. “You’re sorry it happened the way it did, sure, but you’d do it again.”

“What?” 

“You’d do it again,” Tony repeats. “To keep him safe.” 

“I’d find another way,” Steve insists. 

“I didn’t give you much choice, did I?” 

“I’m the one who—I keep going over it in my head. If I’d just told you, we both would have had a lot more choices.” 

Tony shrugs. “But you didn’t. And in that situation. You’d do it again. You’d choose him.” 

“No.” Steve takes a step toward him, realizes what he’s doing, falters. “I’d find another way,” he swears again. 

“Sometimes there isn’t one. What did you say to Wanda? ‘We try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody.’” 

How does Tony even know he said that? “That’s not what I meant.” 

“You could do me the courtesy of not pretending.” Tony’s voice is tight, snappish. His fists are clenched, and Steve wants to peel them open, hold them until they relax. “You’re not going to make things right by lying to me. You have to choose sometimes, and you’d choose him every time.” 

“Then I was wrong. What I said to Wanda. We don’t trade lives. I’d find a way. I have to.” 

A muscle flares in Tony’s jaw. “You think you can save everyone.” 

“I think we have to try.” That’s what they’re out here trying to do now, isn’t it? And they’re getting a little further each time. The ship was about to be destroyed just minutes ago, but they’re back now, it’s intact, they can try again. Bucky and Sam are still here, and Tony’s found a way to keep Peter safe, and hopefully T’Challa, Wanda, Vision, and the rest of them are out there too, fighting on. 

“How are we supposed to do that?” 

“Together.” 

Tony inhales sharply, far too loud. He’s meeting Steve’s gaze now. Steve’s always been entranced by Tony’s eyes. They’re warm, even now. Glittering, sparkling. Like sunlight rippling on water. Like an ember, a spark, among cinders. 

“I’m gonna head to the mess, drown myself in coffee, and go over all the shielding data.” He tilts his head in the direction of the mess hall. “Maybe I can talk it out while you feed that bottomless pit of a stomach?” Tony offers. 

It’s an olive branch. He’s proposing that they spend time together even when they don’t have to, to verbalize all his thoughts even when Steve understands less than half of what he’s talking about. Like during the last loop, with his story about the ocean snails. 

Steve nods, follows him down the corridor. 

Tony hoists himself up to sit on the counter and starts describing the latest glitch in the communication device he’s building while Steve makes coffee. When the coffee is done, he sets a mug next to Tony—who’s now waving his arms in order to better explain something about boson emitters—and to keep his hands busy, starts heating up food, trying to find a way to combine them that’s more interesting and palatable than straight out of their packages. 

He has enough food for everyone on board just about finished when Sam and Bucky come in. Bucky’s carrying a round slab, something in between a dartboard and a chess board. “It’s gonna work,” Bucky insists.

“I dunno man,” Sam replies, but he sets the board down on a nearby tabletop. He presses a button and little holograms of monsters in garish colors appear over the black and white trapezoids of the circle. 

“Nice! Told’ya.” Bucky punches Sam’s shoulder. 

“Is that a dejarik board?” Tony spins on the counter to face Bucky and Sam. 

“It’s gonna be,” Bucky says firmly. 

Sam scoffs good-naturedly. “He doesn’t even know the rules.” 

“We’ll figure it out, c’mon, you’re no fun.” 

“What is it?” Steve asks. 

“You still haven’t seen Star Wars?” Sam gapes. “I am a failure as a friend and an educator.” 

“I watched it once,” Steve says. 

Bucky sizes him up. “The good ones?” 

“I started with the fourth one, like Sam told me to. But I don’t remember this. And I didn’t know you were into it, Bucky.” 

Bucky shrugs. “Usually it’s only bad guys who have cybernetic limbs.” He grins, flexing his metal hand. “I’m just like Luke Skywalker.” 

“Dude insisted that if we were gonna hang out on a spaceship, he had to play dejarik," Sam explains. 

“Now I’ve seen it all,” Tony says, and it occurs to Steve that this conversation among them wouldn’t have seemed possible a few days ago. Tony and Bucky are in the same room together, talking about a movie, and  _ smiling _ . “Unless Romanov is about to come in here with Leia buns?” 

“Nah,” Bucky replies, prodding at one of the holographic monsters. “Nat’s more of an Asajj Ventress.” 

“Holy shit, the Winter Soldier watches Clone Wars?” Tony chuckles. 

“I was recuperating.” 

Tony raises his hands in a placating gesture. “Hey, I’m not judging.”

“Well if anyone’s Leia, it’s Steve.” Bucky smirks. Steve scowls and throws a bread roll at him—a pointless gesture, since Bucky just catches it easily and takes a bite. 

“So are you a Han type of guy?” Sam asks Tony. 

“I think I’m more like Lando.” Tony scratches his beard thoughtfully. “Whaddya think, can I pull off a cape?” 

“I’m just glad I’m not the default Lando,” Sam says. “If I’m gonna be typecast, I’ll take Finn.” 

Arguing about which characters they’re all most like—Bucky thinks Tony is more like a young Obi-Wan, and Sam is comparing himself to someone called Ahsoka—eventually moves onto a discussion of the merits of puppets and miniatures versus CGI. Bucky’s enthusiastically detailing all the best parts of the Battle of Yavin—which Steve gathers is the time the little orange ships managed to blow up the big, moon-sized space station—when suddenly Tony says, “Holy shit, Barnes, you’re a genius.” 

“Hell yeah I am,” Bucky agrees. “What’d I come up with this time?” 

“The Death Star,” Tony explains. “Versus a small fighter. It doesn’t have to be about their superior firepower versus our—by comparison—retrograde tech. We just have to get something small and maneuverable into their weak points.” 

“We don’t have fighters,” Sam points out. 

“Sure we do.” 

“What?” Steve asks sharply. 

“The suit’s space-worthy.” Tony shrugs. 

“You’re talking about going out there alone?” 

“I’ll have the empty suits with me.” Tony looks at Steve fiercely. “You got a better idea?” 

“Well,” Sam interrupts, eyes flicking between them warily. “Their ship doesn’t exactly have a thermal exhaust port connected to a main reactor.” 

“It doesn’t have to. I just have to fly under their guns and get close enough to their engines. I got a good look at how they work the last couple of times I was on board.” Tony’s eyes flick back to Steve’s. “This gonna be a problem?”

Steve bites back a sigh. “Explain the whole plan to me. Please.” 

Tony does. Bucky interjects occasionally with what worked in Star Wars, which makes Tony laugh. When he’s done, Steve grudgingly agrees. 

“Good thing I don’t actually need your permission, anyway,” Tony snaps. 

Steve expects him to leave after that, to storm out or just make some excuse, at the least to return to his projects with Bruce and Strange. But instead he stays and keeps talking about Star Wars with Bucky and Sam. He even sits down with them and tries to work out how to play dejarik. 

Bruce and Natasha join them a few hours later, then Strange. After everyone’s eaten, Tony moves to a table with Bruce and Strange, and they continue their work on the shielding and communication device there, while Bucky fiddles with the holographic monsters. Steve plays Sam and Natasha at cards. The hours pass in what could almost described as calm, the seven of them chattering companionably. 

“It worked!” Bruce’s voice, much louder than he usually speaks, cuts through the conversation. 

“Let’s see if we get any replies before we celebrate too much,” Tony says, but the edges of his mouth are peeking upward and his eyes are warm with excitement. 

“You’ve reached Thor?” Nat asks. 

“And the other ship, and the Guardians,” Bruce replies, excitement all over his face. The device in front of him makes a pulsating chime. “There’s one!” 

Sam’s set down his cards and walked over to the table to get a closer look. “Who’s it from?” 

“That’s Thor, Rocket and Groot,” Tony answers a moment later. “They’ve just left Nidavellir.” 

After a few minute where nothing else happens, Strange urges Tony and Bruce to return to work on the shield. Sam takes his seat beside Nat again and they return to their cards. Two hands later, the device chimes once more. “That’s our sister ship,” Bruce supplies. 

Natasha’s shuffling when the third alert comes in. “And that one’s from Quill!” Bruce says. 

Then the device pulses and sounds off a fourth time. 

Steve and Sam glance at each other. Sam frowns at the other table. “Who’s that?” 

“Doesn’t say,” Bruce answers slowly. 

Tony’s brow knits as he examines the device. “Whoever they are, they’re using an Avengers encryption.” 

“Maybe the other Guardians had to split up for a bit?” Nat suggests. 

“Could be,” Tony allows. 

“Thor could have given them those codes, right?” Steve says, trying the idea out. 

“Maybe.” The jubilation on Bruce’s face is gone. “There shouldn’t have been any way for anyone we didn’t want to get the message to intercept it. That’s part of what was taking so long.” 

“Gotta be the Guardians, then,” Sam says. 

“Whoever it is, if they’re heading our way, they’ll be dealing not only with all of the Avengers but Thor, Stormbreaker, and the Guardians when they get here,” Natasha says firmly.

“Either it’s an ally we don’t know we have, or we’ve just tricked a bad guy into walking right into Thor’s magic hammer-axe,” Bucky agrees with a shrug, not looking up from the green, six-legged monster hologram he’s examining. “You ask me, seems like a win either way.” 

“Yeah, awesome work, guys,” Sam agrees. 

“Yeah,” Bruce says, though he’s still staring dubiously at the device. 

Tony slaps Bruce on the shoulder. “Back to the shield, then?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve has a revelation. He doesn’t mention it to anyone. Strange collapses and refuses to talk about it. An unexpected visitor arrives.

“Yeah,”  Bruce says slowly. “We get the shielding done, maybe the Black Order doesn’t even find us.” He doesn’t exactly sound like he believes it, but some of his enthusiasm has returned.

He, Tony, and Strange return to their work, and everyone else goes back to their games.

An hour or so following the successful communications with the other ships, Sam proposes they call it a night after they finish out the next hand. Between the time loops and the timelessness of the unchanging swirl of stars outside the ship, what a clock would read in some arbitrary place on Earth feels more distant than ever. But they’re all on a similar rhythm now, sharing meals and battles, so Sam’s suggestion comes just as Tony’s in the midst of an argument with Bruce about whether to make more coffee or go to bed, and they all end up trailing off to their cabins around the same time.

Steve dreams of the drawing again, the one he can’t see in full, the spread of paper that’s taller than himself and wider than he can spread his arms. In the way of dreams, it’s at once pinned to the trunks of the acacia trees that grow on the borders of Wakanda and to the walls of the spaceship and it’s floating in the air like a holographic projection. He’s rubbed the eraser down to nothing; now he’s scraping the thin, crushed metal at the end of the pencil against the paper, and it tears open like human skin. The other side is the void of space—or that’s what it’s supposed to be, it’s what the dream is telling him it is, but it isn’t the darkness of sky or a spattering of constellations, it’s a slab of ice, blank and white and cold.

The chill of the ice—or of deep space, or absence, or maybe it’s loss or guilt—lingers on his skin even after he wakes.

Resigned to not getting more sleep, he layers himself in another shirt, a sweater, and then his shield. He didn’t exactly bring running shoes, but his boots are comfortable enough.

Outside of his cabin, the corridor is on low light. Everyone else must still be trying to sleep. It gives the hallways a nighttime feel, only enhanced by the certainty that outside of the ship is the dark, endless reaches of space. Somehow the dimness makes his footfalls seem far too loud as he begins jogging down the hallway. Hoping to tire himself until his brain stops its circling and whirring, he clambers up a chute as quickly as he can, runs down the next corridor as fast as possible. Now that he’s away from the cabins he doesn’t bother trying to keep his footfalls light. He jogs from one common area of the ship to another, climbs up and down ladders, makes his way from one end of the ship to another.

He’s making a sharp turn around a corner when his momentum is cut off by a sudden physical barrier—a person. He’s just beginning to process that he’s run right into another person, when a blast knocks into him. The force of it rams him backward, and he struggles to keep his feet and take stock of the situation.

Tony is standing opposite him, breathing heavily, the nanotech armor assembled into gauntlets over his hands and arms, his hand still open with the repulsor over Steve’s shoulder.

Tony’s eyes widen. “Shit,” he breathes. He’s lowered his arm and the armor is retracting back into the arc reactor. “What are you doing?”

“I was trying to go for a run, I didn’t think anyone else would be awake, I’m sorry, are you okay?”

“Just startled.” Tony sounds sheepish now. “Are you alright?”

“Only a little singed.”

Tony frowns. “Jesus, Steve, I blasted through your clothes, you’re not okay.”

Steve’s breath catches. Is that the first time Tony’s called him by name since all this started? But it isn’t, he realizes. He’d used it once before. _Steve, would you be the best man in my wedding?_

Steve can’t examine that too closely. He pushes the thought away. “I heal fast.”

“So not the point. Lemme take a look?”

There’s an infirmary on the ship, but it’s two levels up from where they are. Steve’s not thrilled at the idea of climbing ladders with his shoulder the way it is, and Tony must be thinking the same thing, because instead he leads him into the lab where he, Bruce, and Strange have been working. One wall is nothing but cabinets, drawers, and shelves, built to be flush with the surface. Tony sits Steve at the end of the booth of seating that surrounds the holographic table and begins digging through drawers. Like most of the surfaces in the ship, the nook the booth extends from is upholstered, and Steve leans against it, sinking into a tiredness more to do with getting a repulsor blast to the chest than being anywhere near his limit for physical exertion.

He must drift off, because the next thing Steve knows, he’s nestled into one corner of the booth, his injury bandaged and nearly healed, and Tony is curled beside him, his head in Steve’s lap. The main light in the room is off, and the ones in the corridor beyond are still dimmed for ship’s night.

“Hey,” Tony whispers.

“Sorry I fell asleep.” Steve rubs sand from his eyes.

Tony shushes him. “Stop that. Just rest, okay? You need to rest.”

Steve suspects Tony needs it more than he does, but lets his head relax against the wall again. He listens to Tony breathing, even and slow, but still awake. His eyes are closed, and Steve has to resist the urge to rest his hand on Tony’s cheek. Earlier that night Tony had shot him in surprise, and before that, when the loop had first reset, it had seemed like he was afraid Steve would hit him, and now he’s right here, tucked under Steve’s arm. He’d put everything aside to help Steve, he realizes. Steve didn’t even really need it, and for all that they’ve managed to spend time together lately—talking, reconnecting—he feels much more deserving of a blast to the chest than the fussing and concern that followed.

But that’s Tony, Steve thinks. Putting everyone else’s needs before his own.

Then he thinks: _Oh. I’m in love with Tony_.

It’s not like with Peggy. Falling in love with Peggy had been easy and right. Not that talking to her had come easily, but wanting her had been. She was just what Steve would have wished for, even before meeting her: poised, fierce, brilliant.

God, it feels like all that happened to someone else.

He’s noticed wanting Tony before, of course, but he’d pushed it aside. Especially lately. And his revelation certainly doesn’t change anything; Tony’s with Pepper. He has someone else—someone who hasn’t betrayed him, hasn’t beaten him into the concrete floor of a Siberian bunker and left him there, alone—he has for years, he’s been getting along just fine without Steve. If they get through this—and even if Steve doesn’t, he fervently needs Tony to make it, can barely picture a world where he doesn’t—he’ll get along just fine without him again. After everything Steve’s put him through, Tony deserves so much more than someone like him.

Steve tries to imagine Tony marrying Pepper: Pepper in a white dress, Tony in a bespoke suit, the sparkle of bubbles in a flute of champagne, all of their friends smiling. In his imagination, Steve is smiling too. He may be envious, clumsy, incapable of hiding his feelings, but Tony will be happy, and if he gets to see that, he can spare some happiness for that day, too. It won’t be the first time that Steve’s had to compartmentalize, to keep moving forward while his heart is breaking. From there he can retreat into the work, into the loneliness he deserves. And maybe eventually he’ll move on.

It’s said that the best revenge is a life well-lived, and for a moment, Steve considers that Tony already knows how Steve feels. It would be just like Tony to figure it out before he does himself. And what better proof could there be of how disproportionate Steve’s feelings are, of how well Tony’s living his life without him, than standing next to Tony while he marries someone else? But no, Steve thinks. Tony’s not that cruel. He really just wants Steve to be there.

“Spit it out, Rogers.”

“What?”

“I can _feel_ you thinking.”

“I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

“You’re the one who got shot.”

“I don’t mean tonight.”

“Oh, that.” Tony rubs his eyes. “There’s nothing else to say about that.”

“Isn’t there?”

“You know, in a way, you’re just apologizing for being stronger than I am.”

“What?” Steve finds himself saying again.

“If I’d been faster, if the suit was more powerful, if you’d been slower or more tired maybe—I’d be the one begging for forgiveness from you. For killing him.” Tony’s voice is hoarse with sleep, but it’s firm, sure.

“You wouldn’t have gone through with it,” Steve insists.  

“You sound very sure of that.”

“I’d still be apologizing for lying to you.”

“Like I’ve never lied to you,” Tony scoffs. He yawns, stretches, and relaxes back into Steve’s lap. It seems incredible, to be having this conversation, like this, with Tony pressed against him.

“That’s really not the point. I shouldn’t have kept it from you.” Maybe it’s the darkness, the feeling of nighttime, the physical distance from all of the places where they’ve hurt each other. Or maybe, a quiet part of Steve suggests, it’s that he’s starting to finally understand why hurting Tony ended up hurting himself so badly.

“Yeah, okay. You shouldn’t have.”

“And I shouldn’t have attacked you.”

“I attacked _him_. What you did was really more of a defensive maneuver.” Tony’s voice is still light; not playful, exactly, but somehow open. It’s not the coldness and distance that spanned between them when Steve first saw Tony again in the New York Sanctum, or the heat of anger and blame that flared between them so many times before. It’s nearly comfortable.

“I missed bickering with you,” Steve finds himself whispering.

Tony chuckles quietly, nestles deeper against Steve. “You’re insane.”

“I know I ruined everything but I’m going to be better. I’m never going to hurt you again,” Steve says fervently.

“That’s not something you can promise.”

“Sure it is.”

“You don’t know what might happen.”

“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t worth it, none of it was worth it. I’m never doing it again.”

“Christ, if I say I believe you will you go to sleep?”

“Tony.”

“Fine, I believe you. Now please turn off your brain and rest.”

Steve smiles and gives in. It’s hours later that he wakes again, to the familiar blare of the proximity alarm.

Tony jolts up and starts sliding out of the booth. “How’s your shoulder?”

Steve checks it. “Completely healed,” he responds, truthfully. He scoops his shield off the table and follows Tony to the control room.  

Now that their team has defeated Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw once, doing it again is smooth, almost straightforward. It’s not exactly the same as the previous loop. It’s better, at first: Strange, Natasha, and the unmanned Iron Man suits take down Cull Obsidian faster than before, without taking any damage themselves. With time even more on their side than ever, they’re able to ambush Ebony Maw earlier on, and for a moment it even looks like they’ve caught him off guard. Between the hail of gunfire from Bucky and Sam and the onslaught of blasts from Tony, Ebony Maw falters, and when Natasha, Steve, and the empty suits use that moment of hesitation to tackle him into the open portal Strange is holding open, Steve thinks—hopes, yearns, wishes—that it might already be over, that he’ll go through and they’ll be rid of him without even a scratch to the ship.

What happens instead is that Ebony Maw recovers instantly and then the ceiling and walls and floor are ripping apart and hurtling toward them, more pieces than Steve and the suits can block. The team has lost their momentary advantage and are back on the defensive again; Steve watches as Bucky’s metal arm stops a chunk of the ship that was about to crush him and Strange, who is hovering and glowing, with five extra pairs of arms sprouting from his shoulders. When the next piece of debris comes their way, several pairs of his hands slice the air and the wreckage passes through both Strange and Bucky as if they were made of air. The next hallway down is crumpling like a wad of paper and as Steve puts himself between the mass tearing toward him and Nat, he sees that the unmanned suits are overpowered, pinned by the rubble.

Bucky ducks under a flying wall panel and Sam spirals out of the way of another—but there’s one more hunk of ship already coming at him. Steve doesn’t have time to think, and he doesn’t need to. He throws himself in front of Sam, knocking him to the side. The twisted piece of metal hits his shield first, but all that does is slow it down as it lands on him, punching the air out of his lungs.

When Steve opens his eyes, he’s flat on the floor of the ship, the chunk of ship that had landed on him lying a few feet away now. His vision swims and churns, his head is throbbing, and his muscles ache. He tries to get his bearings—was there another loop, are they still under attack, when are they—even as he takes the hand Sam’s offered and pulls himself to his feet. Ebony Maw lies a few feet away, motionless, his skull crushed. So that’s taken care of, then. It’s over, again.

Except that Tony is rounding on him, glaring. The armor has retracted back into the arc reactor, and down the hall Nat, Bucky, Bruce, and the unmanned suits are already patching the ship together. Oh. He must have been out for a little while, then.

“That was beyond stupid,” Tony snaps.

“I’m fine,” Steve says, frowning, and it’s true that his vision is already cleared and he can feel his headache receding.

“ _So_ not the point.”

“Sam was—”

“Hey,” Sam spreads his arms, a shrug and an apology all at once. “Not saying I don’t appreciate the thought, man, but I had time to get of the way.”

Tony’s jaw works. “You always—”  

But Tony’s cut off before Steve can hear what it is that he is or always does. Bruce’s voice cuts in over the ship’s systems. “There’s something coming right at us. It’s not an attack, though,” he adds quickly. “It’s—meet us in the control room.”

Tony’s already jogging in that direction. “You’re not off the hook, Rogers,” he calls over his shoulder.

Steve sighs and trails after him, his hands in his pockets. Sam chuckles as he, Nat, and Bucky follow after him.

When they reach the control room, Strange has a portal open, larger than the ones Steve’s seen him use before.

“It looks like an escape pod,” Bruce says. “But it’s not from any of the ships we were expecting to see.”

“Anyone on board?” Sam asks.

“Inconclusive,” Tony replies, sounding frustrated.

“Here it comes,” Bruce says—unnecessarily, as a sphere 10 feet in diameter soars through the portal and lands heavily on the ground.

The portal flickers, then vanishes. It doesn’t slot closed, the way they usually do, it’s just _gone_ , and Steve’s gaze immediately snaps from where it’s disappeared to where Strange is standing. Or was standing, because he’s just collapsed.

Well, crumpled—his cloak is holding him up, but his body is limp and his eyelids are fluttering.

“You're okay, Doc,” Tony says, reaching Strange first.

“It’s nothing,” Strange growls, finding his feet and pulling away. “Let’s see who our visitor is.”

“Didn’t really look like nothing,” Bucky says.

Strange fixes Bucky with an icy glare. “It’s none of your concern.” He turns back to the pod. “We have more important things to deal with.”

Steve isn’t sure about that, and judging by the glances exchanged around the room, no one else is either, but they all converge on the door of the sphere, weapons, shield, and armor at the ready. The unmanned armors pry it open and toss the door to the side.

It’s dimmer inside of the pod, but still bright enough to make out the curved walls covered in switches, buttons, and small screens, as well as an upholstered structure that’s something like a couch, a hammock, and a bed mixed together. Standing in the center of it, slipping slightly as it works to maintain a balance on the padded surface, is a deer.

“Uh,” Sam says. “Is that one of the Guardians?”

“I’m not the only one who sees Bambi, right?” Bucky asks.

The deer takes a step forward, its hooves skidding as the ground dips and gives underneath it. “My systems say deer, yeah,” Tony agrees. “Anyone else? Doc?”

All heads turn toward Strange. He’s not replying. He’s not moving, or surrounded by mandalas, or doing anything else, either.

“Strange?” Natasha tries.

Strange begins to topple over. Steve watches as the cloak rearranges itself to support him.

Sam bends over him, takes his pulse. “He’s breathing,” he reports. “But he’s _out._ ”

The deer takes another tentative step toward them, stumbling over the edge of the structure as it steps down to the floor of the pod.

Well, Steve thinks. At least the deer doesn’t seem to be trying to kill them.

  



	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce and Tony have a new destination in mind for their ship, one that they hope will offer a much-needed tactical advantage. Strange regains consciousness briefly, but not long enough to explain anything—leaving them with nobody to reset time if anything goes wrong. Tony’s idea to attack the Black Order’s ship like it’s the Death Star very nearly works as planned. The deer is…not a normal deer.

The unmanned suits, assisted by the cloak, carry Strange to the infirmary. Everyone else trails after them, including the deer.

It isn’t a species Steve recognizes. It’s clearly a buck, with expansive antlers that flare into a broad shovel shape. It’s the size of an adult, but is dappled with white spots that make Steve think of fawns. Its hooves clang dully on the floor as it pads along, its golden eyes fixed in a blank stare at nothing in particular.

“Aren’t deer usually kinda…skittish?” Bruce asks.

“Not to mention, not typically found in space,” Natasha puts in.

“Ship’s sensors also say deer,” Tony complains. His arms are crossed and he’s scowling, his eyes flashing between the deer and the suits carrying Strange. “But magic might do that, and we don’t know, because our magic expert is unconscious. After telling us not to worry about him.”

“So we’re screwed if we need a time reset,” Sam says.

“Unless we can wake him up,” Bucky suggests.

“When did the Order show up before? How much time have we got?” Sam asks as they reach the infirmary.

As soon as the door opens, the cloak lifts Strange out of the grasp of the suits and flies him onto the closest bed. Other than the row of narrow beds, the room is a lot like every other part of the ship. The upholstery might be thicker, in some places.

“About four hours,” Natasha replies as everyone files in. The suits stay in the hallway, standing by the doorway like sentries.

The group hovers around Strange’s prone form, shuffling and staring. Finally Tony puts a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Okay, you’re on, Banner.” Tony winces a little. “I know it’s not actually your thing but you’re the closest to a medical doctor we’ve got with Strange out of commission. Unless any of our rogue Avengers picked up an MD while on the run?”

“Not so much,” Sam answers. “I’m still a medic though. Let me know how I can help, Dr. Banner.”

Bruce nods and begins his examination. Tony folds a wall panel open into a desk and starts running some more scans with the ship’s systems. Steve heads to the mess hall, thinking he’ll fix up some food for everyone, since they seem to be lingering in the infirmary for now. Bucky, Natasha, and the deer come after him, Bucky patting the creature on its neck experimentally. “You speak English?” he asks.

The deer blinks vacant, amber eyes.

Bucky glares at Steve. “Hey, it’s worth a shot. You said the Guardians had a talking raccoon and a tree that walks around.”

Steve raises his hands placatingly. “I didn’t say a word!”

“Didn’t have to, I could feel you judging me. You don’t judge me, right, Spot?” Bucky scratches the deer behind one ear.

“Spot?” Natasha asks, teasing.

Bucky shrugs. “He’s got spots.”

Standing in the ship’s curved mess hall, unpacking canisters that he remembers having already eaten, arranging food for the whole team, feels like one of a series of actions with a sense of familiarity somewhere in between routine and _déjà vu_. The deer eating oats from Bucky’s palm is a new addition, at least.

Steve finds himself watching Bucky—Natasha leans against him, looking relaxed, and the deer burrows its face into Bucky’s hand—and remembering the aftermath of the battle in Wakanda. It’s still only a few days ago to him. Bucky had disintegrated before his eyes. It could still happen again. For all that they’re more prepared now, that they’re all in it together, for all that they have so many chances—it’s really all just one more chance. Eventually they’ll catch back up to when their original present was, run out of times Strange can loop the spell, and there will be nothing left to do.

Maybe this time Steve will be part of the half that leaves, and Bucky can go on without him.

He’s not sure whether that would be any better, for either of them.

Steve remembers a night, or more accurately very early morning, at the tower—waking from a nightmare of faceless people and a figure who was always falling, falling, falling, just out of his reach—when he’d wandered into Tony’s workshop and ended up falling asleep on the couch beside a glowing workstation while Tony read out aloud the code of a program he’d been debugging. Before he’d drifted off, Tony had set forth on a tangent about the importance of starting to count at zero instead of one. Something about that had stuck with Steve—in part because of how heated Tony’s voice had gotten as he expounded about how it should be taught in preschools, and Steve’s apparently always been a sucker for how, well, _adorable_ Tony is when he’s worked up about an idea—this idea of starting with nothing instead of something. And now that he finds himself counting time backwards more often than forwards, he ends up back at zero instead of stopping at one.

So if their zeroth time through this fight ended back in the New York Sanctum with Thor, Nebula, Rocket, and the Valkyrie, when Wong noticed the Eye being activated, then they’re on their seventh time through it now. It’d taken them five tries to defeat Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian, and that’s too many. Their ship’s already been taken down by the rest of the Black Order once, they can’t let it happen again—and certainly not now that Strange is down. They have to get to the real fight, to Thanos, while they still have options open.

Maybe this time, they’ll have Thor and everyone else with them, too. It’s something to hope for, at least.

Steve lets himself imagine victory, for a moment. All of Thanos’ ships destroyed, his armies defeated. Thanos himself with Stormbreaker embedded in his skull. Everyone else unharmed, somehow: T’Challa and Okoye side by side as always, poised and proud and able to return to a Wakanda untouched by war; Bucky and Natasha celebrating with a kiss; Wanda and Vision holding hands, holding each other, as if they’d never fought on opposite sides of a conflict; Sam and Rhodes grinning at each other in delight, making jokes about the superiority of the Air Force over the Army; everyone else smiling, impossibly smiling, Rocket, Bruce, Groot, the sorcerers, the rest of the Guardians—Steve isn’t sure he’s seen Strange or Rocket smile and he hasn’t met most of the Guardians but right now he can picture it all, anyway. And in the privacy of his mind, he’s beside Tony, and maybe—but no.

Tony has Pepper. And if they can get there—Bucky and Sam and T’Challa and everyone else still alive and all the people of Earth safe and unaware of the danger they’ve been in—then that’s already more than Steve can dare to hope for. Tony wants to be friends again, and that’s more than Steve deserves.

But he wants to picture it, anyway. He remembers just hours ago, drifting to sleep with Tony pressed against him, his head in his lap. He wants that, to hold him close and just _be_ with him. To wake up not to the alarm of the Black Order boarding the ship but to the sound of Tony breathing. What would Tony be like, coming out of sleep naturally, wrapped in Steve’s arms? Griping for coffee, probably. Groggy and grumpy but still somehow beautiful and manic. Steve could take him by the arm, still him with a kiss—no.

If it were up to Pepper, Steve thinks bitterly, Tony wouldn’t even be up here. The rest of them would still be fighting Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian and unable to contact their allies. He knows it’s not fair; if _he_ had Tony, he would try to keep him safe, too. But he can’t help but think that he would know better than to try keeping Tony from protecting people.

Steve scolds himself. Jealousy won’t get him anywhere. He needs to focus. The Black Order’s ship is on its way and there’s something wrong with Dr. Strange and standing around comparing himself to Pepper Potts isn’t about to help anything.

He shakes his head to clear it. “Food’s ready,” Steve says. Bucky and Natasha have been chatting quietly while the deer blinks at them; they nod, stand, and all file out back toward the infirmary.

When they get there, Tony, Bruce, and Sam are bent over a hologram showing a patch of stars with their ship passing through it. There’s a bright, flickering light in the center, dissipating golden rays in an arc that makes Steve think it’s not just a representation of a large star but something else entirely.

Sam grins at their approach and hops to his feet. “Sweet, I’m starving. Never thought I’d be so happy to see that mush.”

“Don’t pretend like you have taste, Wilson,” Bucky says, swinging onto a bed beside Strange and pulling a plate of food into his lap.

“So long as you don’t pretend like you have a sense of humor, Barnes,” Sam retorts, taking a plate of his own and settling back in the seat by the holograms.

“How’s the patient?” Natasha asks, taking a seat on the edge of the bed Bucky’s stretched out on.

The deer takes several sure steps into the room and situates itself in a corner, observing them with the same blank stare.

Bruce chews on a lip and shakes his head. “I don’t get it. Other than being unconscious, everything says he’s fine.”

“And what’s all that stuff?” Bucky indicates the holograms with his elbow, not pausing from shoveling food into his mouth.

“It’s our next plan,” Tony says. “Sort of.”

“We heard from Quill,” Bruce says. “Thanos has already been to Knowhere and gotten the Reality Stone.”

“And Gamora,” Tony adds, sounding tired and bitter. His arms are crossed and he’s staring at the light in the middle of the hologram, which quivers and flares like tendrils of flame. “Which means he’s on his way to getting the Soul Stone, too.”

“And there’s no point in us staying on course to Knowhere,” Bruce agrees.

“So we’re heading for that thing instead?” Steve guesses, taking a seat beside Sam.

“What is it?” Natasha asks.

“It’s a spatial distortion…thing,” Bruce replies.

“Illuminating, huh,” Sam scoffs.

“We’ve been collecting data as we go, of course. We were hoping to find an Einstein-Rosen Bridge but” —Tony cuts himself off, jumping to his feet and heading toward Strange— “Doc? You okay?”

Strange is already sitting up and massaging his temples. “I’m fine.”

“Convincing,” Sam says.

“The way you passed out is really selling that,” Natasha agrees.

“Remind me, which of us has a medical degree and is a master of the mystic arts?” Strange snarls. He drops his hands and takes a look around the room. His eyes settle on the deer. “Oh, _you’re_ here now, fantastic.”

“You know the deal with that deer?” Bruce asks, his eyes narrowing.

Strange rolls his eyes, crosses his arms, and opens his mouth to say something else, when he wilts once more. He falls back onto the pillows, his eyes closed, his arms limp. His cloak shifts the covers around him, tucking him in.

“Great,” Bucky says. “That explained _everything_.”

“Any sign of what woke him?” Sam asks, pulling up another hologram, this one showing Strange’s heartbeat and a lot of other numbers and graphs Steve can’t make sense of from here.

“Nothing.” Bruce runs a hand through his hair and sighs heavily. “Nothing I can detect, anyway.”

“So this spatial distortion, then,” Natasha nudges.

“Right.” Bruce reaches into the projection of stars and space and tugs his hands apart, expanding the image so it floats in the center of the room, longer from end to end than the beds that line the walls. “So. Space is mostly empty: a few planets, a few stars, a lot of nothing. But all the hyperspace travel that goes on in this part of the galaxy—it leaves things behind. Tears, folds, pathways.”

“And which one of those is this?” Steve asks, picking at his food and trying to keep his eyes on the hologram while Tony paces.

“We’re calling it a gravity cloud,” Bruce says.

“You’re calling it that,” Tony corrects. “I wanted to call it—”

“I think the explanation works better without the vulgarity,” Bruce says mildly.

Despite himself, Steve smiles, wanting to know what Tony named the thing. Instead of asking about it, though, he says, “So what does it do?”

Tony turns to the hologram and slides his hands into it. Steve notices that the ring finger on his left hand is bare. Tony expands the projection even further, so the cloud of light is as large as the whole projection was a moment before, and the stars on the outer edges reach the far walls of the room. They twinkle distantly, like dust motes catching the sun. Dappled light casts more spots on the already spotted deer, who shifts on its hooves and blinks at the light in the center of the room. “It fucks with gravity,” Tony explains. He pinches his thumb and forefinger over the projection of their ship and tugs it into the glowing center. The ship begins to continue on the same trajectory as before, then stutters and spins, like it’s bouncing off of something invisible. “Among other things. It pulls in all sorts of shit, kind of like a black hole, but different. It’s unstable though, not consistent, so it’s mostly traversable, and light and mass can go in and out. The energy shields the Black Order use won’t work inside it, to start. Energy weapons will be fucked, too. So we’ll actually be at an advantage with projectiles and close-range weapons. And the distortion works better than anything we could make to disrupt communications.”

“It might even disrupt the power of the Stones,” Bruce says.

“That’s speculation,” Tony says sharply. “We can’t count on that.”

“You were saying earlier that it’ll make our shielding better, though,” Sam says. “How does it kill their shields and help ours?”

“It kills the shields that protects their ships from missiles, or from us trying to ram our ship against theirs, or anything like that,” Tony explains. “But our shields aren’t so hot at that already. Then on top of that, the gravimetric distortions of the cloud do a better job than our shields do at blocking the signals the Time Stone is sending out, or anything else that could be used to track us. No one will be able to find us unless we want them to.”

“And,” Bruce adds, “the unstable gravity, plus all of the debris that stuck in there, will be a lot more dangerous for their bigger ships than our smaller ones. We can weave in and out, but with any luck, they’ll be tugged all over the place.”  

“It’s a briar patch,” Steve says.

Tony shrugs. “Close enough.”

“When do we get there?” Bucky asks.

“Did you seriously just say ‘when are we gonna get there?’ Is this a family road trip?” Natasha teases. Bucky kicks her lightly in reply.

“We’ll reach it in five or so hours,” Bruce answers, sounding more tired than before.

“So, not before the Black Order finds us,” Sam fills in.

“Probably not, no,” Bruce agrees.

“Okay,” Sam says firmly. “We just gotta kick their asses, then.”

Tony swings his arms toward each other in an arc, compressing the projection of the stars and the gravity cloud down to nothing. “Good thing we have a plan for that, too.”

“Is jumping in with your armor and making things explode really a plan, Tony?” Bruce asks, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hands.

“Bruce is right,” Steve says before he can stop himself. “You can’t just fly out and—”

“You’ll find that I can, actually,” Tony snaps, shooting a glare at Steve and then quickly averting his eyes. “If I hit the engines right, it’ll start a chain reaction and—”

Steve gets to his feet, clenching and unclenching his fists. “And what if you don’t hit it right, or if they—”

Tony spins and rounds on Steve, his eyes flashing. “Are you really going to lecture me about putting myself in the line of fire, Rogers?”

“If you’re going to insist on another suicide run, then yeah, I’m gonna try to stop you.” Steve stares down at Tony, feeling like it’s that first day they met and they’re arguing on the helicarrier again, wanting to push Tony until he just _stops_.

“Hey,” Sam says. He’s standing beside them now. Steve isn’t sure when he got up. “You’ve been over this already. It’s the best plan we’ve got, right?”

Sam’s looking at Steve, studying him, but it’s Tony who says, “Right.”

“Why don’t you two just take some breaths and try to think about what you’re really arguing about, rephrase things so the other can try to understand where you’re coming from,” Sam suggests, his voice schooled into an even, mild tone that makes Steve want to punch things.

Tony apparently feels the same way. Funny what they can agree on sometimes. He bristles at Sam’s words, his spine straightening, his gaze snapping to Sam’s face. “Oh, I’m _so sorry_ , I didn’t know I’d signed up for couples counseling. Am I not using enough ‘I’ statements?”

Sam closes his eyes slowly. “Look, you both—”

Tony’s already turned his attention back to Steve. “ _I_ am tired of your sanctimonious bullshit. _I_ am done with you not trusting me to do what has to be done.” Tony moves closer into Steve’s space, glaring up at him, ticking off his list on one hand. “ _I_ am done with you throwing yourself in front of _everything_ and taking hits when you don’t fucking need to and then telling me not to do my job. How’s that?” The last he practically spits out, then whirls out of the room.

Steve’s listening to Tony’s footsteps fall away, trying to catch his breath. Everyone is staring at him, waiting for him to say something. Finally, he turns on his heel and heads out himself, being sure to head in the opposite direction as Tony.

He goes to his cabin and tries to find something to keep his mind off of his argument with Tony. Why can’t he see that Steve just wants him to be _careful_? With little else to do, he ends up going over the ship’s capabilities again. When that’s through, he reviews the schematics, even though he’s long since memorized them. He’s trying to read through the data on the gravity cloud when there’s a knock at his door. “Come in,” he calls, setting down the tablet he’s been studying.

“Hey.” It’s Natasha, a small smile playing on her face. She takes a step in and the door slides shut behind her. “Thought you could use some company.”

“Thanks,” Steve says.

“How’re you doing?” Natasha asks, taking a seat opposite Steve and arranging herself so her legs are leaning against one wall and her feet are resting on the little fold-out table.

Steve laughs a little at that. “I’m not really sure how to answer that.”

“Fair enough.” She flashes him a grin that’s too small, too brief, too sad. “He thinks you don’t trust him.”

Steve doesn’t have to ask who she means. He shakes his head, looking down at his hands in his lap. “He’s the one who shouldn’t trust me.”

“Ah.” He looks up to see a knowing expression on her face. “You’ve tried to talk to him about that, I take it?”

He doesn’t have to ask what she means by _that_ , either. _That_ is everything between himself and Tony that’s keeping them on edge, circling each other, at each other’s throats. “A few times, yeah.”

“He came to talk to me, too.”

“Yeah?”

“He says he trusts me, still. You, Sam, all of us. Even James.”

Steve picks pointlessly at the smooth surface of the table. “I don’t see how he can.”

“He does, though. He really does.” He can feel her eyes on him but keeps running his fingernails along the flawless tabletop instead. “I didn’t see how you could still trust me, when everything was going to hell in DC.”

Steve looks up to meet her eyes at that. “That’s different.”

“Is it?” she asks. “Lying to people is my job, Steve. I’ve switched sides so many times I’ve lost count.” She shrugs a little. “I thought I was fighting the good fight finally, working for SHIELD.”

Steve tries to laugh again at that, but all that comes out is a cracked, bitter bark. “So did I.”

“I thought it was the right thing to support the Accords, too, at first. But not at the expense of people getting hurt.

“You did the right thing, Nat.”

“Easy for you to say.” There’s another smile forming on her face, small and wry, starting to reach her eyes. “I helped get your and James’ sorry butts out of that airport without getting arrested or your asses beaten by T’Challa.”

“You sure did,” he agrees.

“It all felt like the right thing, is what I’m saying. A lot of things do, in the moment. It’s trusting myself that’s tricky, lately. But knowing that you’re on my side—that means a lot.”

Steve reaches across the table and she holds her hand out for him, letting him grab it. “You too.”

Natasha gives him another brief smile and changes the subject after that. He lets her draw him into a conversation on the last battle with Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw, then onto an aikido move she’d been teaching him the last time they had space to spar together, then a description of Bucky’s earliest attempts to copy the holograms for the dejarik board. When she tries to get him to talk about Tony again, though, he stops her. He doesn’t know what to say, and isn’t sure he wants to hear what she thinks. If anyone’s noticed Steve’s feelings for Tony, it would be her, and he doesn’t need another person to tell him how hopeless he is, how he’s letting himself be distracted when there’s so much at stake.

They’re playing chess when the proximity alert goes off. Steve starts to stand, but she grabs his hand and pulls him back down. “Gotta sit this one out,” she says, meeting his gaze steadily.

“Let’s at least go to the control room,” he insists, refusing to still. “Maybe there’s something we can do from there.”

She shakes her head but lets him up and walks beside him as they head toward the center of the ship.

When they reach it, Bruce is already there, in the pilot’s seat, surrounded by the steering holograms and projections of their ship that turn and spin with his movements. The deer is there too, for some reason, standing only a few inches away from Bruce. The control room is covered in holograms. Somewhere with charts and graphs, bars of data moving up and down, bell curves undulating and flickering. A huge pair of them shows the torus-shaped ship, towering in comparison to their own, and the flashing bursts of energy it shoots their way. Each time the bright flares hit the hologram of their ship, a monstrous creak shudders through the walls.

The hologram that fixes Steve’s interest, though, is the one that’s zoomed into a section of the Black Order’s massive vessel, showing Tony and the three unmanned suits breaching the shielding. When he’d first hit on the idea, Tony had explained how their force fields were made to keep out fast-moving objects and energy, like energy weapons and bullets or missiles, rather than slower objects—objects like a suit of armor. The projection flashes red at the spot Tony needs to hit, just a few inches away in the scale of the hologram. Steve crosses his arms and tries to analyze the situation tactically. Sam must still be with Strange—and god, what if this doesn’t work and Strange is still out, this could be their last chance and Steve is just _standing there_ , being utterly _useless_ —and Bucky must be with him too. Steve wishes he were with Bucky now, but he has to be here, he has to witness this, even if he’s completely helpless.

The four figures zoom over the pocked surface of the hull, now under the cover of the ship’s own shields, heading straight for the engines. Beside him, Natasha takes a sharp intake of breath. In a moment, Steve sees the problem she’s identified—Tony isn’t going to make it. Not in time. Steve spares a glance for the readout of their own shields, and they’re one hit away from their ship being destroyed. Again.

Bruce mutters to himself and pulls the controls sharply to one side, the projection of the ship following suit. On the hologram, an energy burst passes through their shield like it’s nothing and grazes the side of their little ship. “Not gonna last much longer,” Bruce breathes.

That’s when the deer jerks suddenly, like it’s startled. Steve takes a step toward it, but before he can get any closer, it flickers, shimmers—and then it isn’t a deer standing there, it’s Loki.

Loki cocks his head and grins. “Your savior is here,” he croons.

Natasha is already throwing herself toward him. “Don’t,” she spits.

Bruce looks panicked. “Nat, the—”

That’s when the final hit comes. The clashing, violently off-key noise is staggering, overwhelming all of Steve’s other senses. A split second later it recedes, leaving a dull roar in his ears, but everything is still going too fast, or maybe he’s just going too slowly because now he’s taking in everything at once: the crackle of green light surging into Loki’s fingertips, the screens and holograms all flashing dark at once, the gash that’s tearing the entire far wall of the room open, the air knocked from his lungs, the ache and the cold, oh god, the cold, the darkness—

Steve’s standing in the ship’s mess hall, pouring coffee into a mug. Tony is sitting on the counter just inches away, taking in a gulp of air and clutching the edge with white knuckles.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team discusses Loki and contacts their allies once more. Steve and Tony talk about losing Peter and Bucky. Steve loses his head a little after a smooth defeat of Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian.

“I’ll have to be faster next time,” Tony says, pulling his hands away from the edge of the countertop and clenching them in his lap. “Strange woke up in the nick of time, then?”

Steve shakes his head slowly and sets the full mug of coffee next to Tony. “He wasn’t the one who reset it this time.”

“Uh.” Tony’s brow knits together. “Then who was?”

“It all happened in a few seconds, but. The deer was actually Loki.”

Tony’s frown deepens. “Thor said Thanos killed him.”

“Well.” Steve lets out a heavy exhale. “He’s been wrong before.”

“Yeah, true. Wow. Okay. That’s deeply troubling and we’re going to have to talk about that. For now I’m gonna go see if Strange is conscious, then Bruce and I should contact everyone again—”

“Before you go,” Steve cuts him off, not sure how he’s getting the words out. Tony turns to him, not bothering to hide the questioning expression on his face. “I wanted to say. Your plan. To destroy their ship in the suit. It’s a good one.”

“Yeah, of course it is.” Tony’s face is inscrutable. It’s not even a mask, Steve just can’t read it.

He plows on anyway. “But is there a way someone can come with you next time? In one of the other suits?”

Tony shakes his head. “They weren’t designed for a person to wear, they aren’t finished off. I was fabricating in a hurry, didn’t really have time to do more.” He sounds apologetic, like he should have found a way to manufacture Iron Man suits for the whole Avengers team, all the Guardians, and Thor for good measure the morning the time loops began. “Someone petite—Natasha, maybe—could fit in one, but it wouldn’t protect her from vacuum. They aren’t set up to have a HUD or anything either, so there’s not a lot even Nat could do with one.”

“Okay.” Steve swallows. “Look. I know you can do it, take out their engines and everything else. It’s a good plan. It’s not that I don’t trust you.” Tony’s expressions hardens at that, becomes sharper somehow. “Really. I’m just—I’m worried about you.”

“That’s—” Tony tilts his head, his eyes flickering across Steve’s face. “Don’t be,” he says finally, and leaves.

Steve watches him go, trying to focus on making sense of what was just said rather than enjoying the way Tony’s hips sway when he walks. Sighing, Steve runs his hands through his hair. When he’s sure Tony’s gone, he heads to his cabin to try to learn about the gravity cloud some more.

Half an hour later, Friday’s voice comes through the speakers, telling him that Strange hasn’t regained consciousness but has been moved to the infirmary once more and that everyone else is assembling in a lounge on the level with the lab. “What for?” Steve asks, stretching as he unfolds himself from the narrow seat.

“Not sure, Steve,” Friday replies, and Steve thinks of JARVIS and his _Sirs_ and _Captains_. “There was talk of contacting the other Avengers and Loki.” That makes sense, Steve thinks. The communications device hadn’t been complete at this point during the last loop, so Bruce and Tony must have just finished constructing it again this time.

Sure enough, when Steve arrives, Natasha, Bruce, and Bucky are sitting at a round table with the device in front of Bruce. Natasha is glaring at Bruce, and Bruce is picking at his fingernails, saying, “C’mon, Nat, he helped us,” while Bucky sits between them, looking perplexed. “He helped Thor on Asgard, and he tried to help against Thanos, and then he reset time for us.”

“We can’t trust him,” Natasha insists, and Steve remembers the conversation he had with her at the end of the last loop. He wonders exactly how short the list of people Natasha trusts is these days.

“We can trust him to save his own ass,” Tony says, walking in with Sam. Tony throws himself onto a curved set of upholstered seats that’s almost a couch, sprawling so one foot is resting on a table, leg bent over the top of the seat.

Steve realizes he’s still standing stiffly by the door and moves to a seat that faces everyone else. Sam settles easily beside him. “We don’t have a lot of choices,” Steve says on a sigh.

“Holy shit, are you agreeing with me?” Tony says. “Kinda making me rethink my position, here.”

“Loki tried to kill all of us,” Natasha reminds them sharply.

“Not me so much,” Bucky says. “Not directly, anyway.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure either,” Sam puts in.

“He was working _with Thanos_ ,” Natasha says. “Bruce, you said that yourself.”

“No one’s saying we forgive him,” Sam says. “For New York or anything else.”

“He’s terrified of the Hulk,” Bruce says. “He’ll behave.”

Natasha lips twist like she’s tasting something sour. “Too bad we don’t have the Hulk.”

Tony smiles wolfishly. “Loki doesn’t know that.”

“You’re going to try to trick a god of mischief.” Natasha shakes her head.

“You did it,” Steve reminds her.

“I’m gonna try to have a talk with Hulk, anyway,” Bruce says.

“We’re fine without him,” Tony insists.

“Wouldn’t mind the backup, though,” Sam says.

“Fine,” Natasha says finally. “We’ll try it. But I don’t like it.”

“I don’t think anyone likes it,” Bucky agrees.

Natasha fixes a look at Bruce. “Bruce doesn’t seem to mind.”

Bruce sighs and rubs his eyes. “I’m not saying I’m gonna be best friends with the guy, I just—”

“Let’s not go there,” Tony says, untangling his legs and sitting up in a more conventional position. “So we’re sending the signal out again, yeah? And telling Loki not to bother with the Rudolph schtick this time.”

There are murmurs of agreement. Natasha has her arms crossed—which means she wants everyone to know she’s still pissed enough to not bother hiding it—but nods tightly. Bruce fiddles with the communication device in front of him. Once again, there’s an immediate reply from Thor, Rocket, and Groot.

“Should we…” Bruce chews on one side of his bottom lip and looks around the room. “Thor would want to know Loki’s alive.”

Sam scoffs. “Loki probably wants to show him himself.”

“Let’s ruin his surprise, then,” Tony says, standing up and ambling toward Bruce and the machine he’s bent over.

“Yeah, okay,” Bruce agrees, and inputs something into the array in front of him.

A few minutes later, they have confirmation from Quill and the rest of the Guardians. They’re still on their way to Knowhere. Steve frowns. “They don’t remember the previous loops. Did we try to warn them last time? About what happens when they get there?”

Bruce shifts in his seat. “There’s limited bandwidth, more or less. We can’t send a dissertation or anything. But yeah, we did. Didn’t do any good though.”

The device chimes not long after that, and Bruce frowns. “I think Loki just sent us a crystal ball emoji.”

“This thing has emojis?” Sam asks.

“More like an ASCII picture,” Bruce says.

Tony laughs at that, a rich sound that Steve can’t help but savor. It doesn’t last long, but when he’s done there’s a warm grin lingering on Tony’s face that makes something in Steve’s chest clench.

When they hear from their sister ship and have confirmation from everyone about the coordinates of the gravity cloud they’re heading toward, Sam heads to the infirmary to check on Strange, Bruce leaves to attempt conversation with the Hulk, and Natasha and Bucky walk out together with Natasha combing her fingers through Bucky’s hair.

Steve expects Tony to leave too, but instead he slides into the seat Bruce vacated, props both legs up on the table beside the communications device and says, “How’re you holding up, Cap?”

“I’m not sure,” Steve replies truthfully. “You?”

“I’ve been trying not to think about it, to be honest.” Tony’s angled toward Steve, his posture open, but he’s not quite looking directly at him. Steve can’t stop himself from checking his hand—and finds that he still isn’t wearing his engagement ring.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, wondering if there’s anything he can do to put Tony at ease. “Me too.”

“But it’s going better now, right? It’s gotta work.” He’s staring at Steve now. He’s nearly pleading, Steve realizes. He thinks Steve has the answers.

Or maybe he needs Captain America to assure him everything will be okay. Steve’s not sure he has that in him, but he also can’t bear the vulnerability in Tony’s eyes, wants to give him anything he can to help, wants to give him everything—so where does _that_ leave him? “Yeah,” he finally repeats. “It has to.” He swallows. “It can’t happen again.”

He knows his use of pronouns and general lack of specificity leave something to be desired, but Tony nods, seeming to know what he’s saying. He’s still watching Steve, his eyes somewhere at Steve’s hairline now, and Steve can’t help but soak up even that much attention from Tony while he has it. “When Peter went,” Tony says, then stops. He freezes for a moment, far too still. He’s wound tight, Steve thinks, he’s going to break. After a breath Tony starts moving again, only it’s not the fluid, gliding movement he has when he’s relaxed or fighting, nor the frenetic bouncing of when he’s agitated, over-caffeinated, or under-slept. It’s a shaking, shuddering motion that makes Steve want to wrap him in his arms until he smooths out again. “And I didn’t know who else was gone,” Tony continues, and Steve hates the way his voice sounds, every syllable carefully measured and completely wrong. “Who else survived. Whether anyone did.”

“God,” Steve breathes. “That’s horrible, Tony. I’m sorry. I wish—I wish you’d had more help out there.” He’s thinking of himself, of course, which is laughable. Or maybe it’s not—he’s out here in space now, all of them are, together, and Tony’s right, it _is_ going better. Slowly, incrementally better.

Tony half-shrugs, a jerky movement that he seems to think better of before it’s even finished. “Well, I had Nebula. Wish we could get a hold of _her_ right now.” His eyes move back to Steve’s. “You saw—you watched it happen to Barnes, you said.” His voice is quiet, maybe even tentative.

“He called for me,” Steve says. “I didn’t go to him. I didn’t reach him before it happened.” He let’s the _again_ go unspoken.

“Peter knew it was happening,” Tony whispers, his eyes totally unfocused now, not looking at Steve or at anything else. “He felt it.”

Steve gets to his feet slowly and walks toward where Tony’s sitting. He should probably ask first but he can’t bring himself to say anything out loud—can’t bear for the offer to be rejected out loud, either—so instead he telegraphs his movements as much as possible as he sinks down beside Tony and gently folds his arms around him. Tony curls into it, his face buried in Steve’s chest. “It scares me, you going after that ship by yourself. It shouldn’t, but it does. I can’t watch you die, too.”

“Me neither,” Tony says into Steve’s shirt. “So don’t throw yourself in front of half a spaceship’s worth of debris when you don’t have to, okay.”

It was a lot less than half of the ship, but Steve knows that’s not the point. “I’ll try. You be careful out there too, okay?”

“What are you talking about, I’m the model of circumspection.” Steve can hear the faint smile in the muffled voice, and unbidden, he smiles in answer. His arms feel wrong, like they’re the wrong size, or maybe his whole body is—he wants to reach up, caress Tony’s face, run his fingers through his hair, but he knows he can’t.  

“This is how I should have done it,” Steve says. “We used to talk, Tony. Even when the world wasn’t ending, we talked to each other. I should have told you about your parents.”

Tony pulls away at that, and Steve freezes, hates himself for ruining this moment of comfort for them both. But then he realizes that Tony is still looking at him, his features soft. He places a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Steve,” he says, and there it is again, his name on Tony’s lips. “You aren’t the only one who knew, you know.”

Steve shakes his head, can’t stop himself from reaching for Tony’s other hand with his own. “But—”

“Yeah, I wish you’d said something. We don’t really need to revisit how angry I was. But Natasha knew too. So did Fury and Peggy. It happened, but it’s over, and it’s not all on you.”

Steve doesn’t deserve the gentleness in Tony’s voice, the tender way he’s touching him, how he’s letting Steve clutch his hand. “But I was supposed to be your friend.”

“You are,” Tony assures him.

_He’s my friend._

_So was I._

“Okay,” Steve says after a moment of watching Tony’s eyes. Tony probably thinks of his eyes as coffee-colored, Steve muses, but they’re more like cinnamon or maple syrup, flecked with golden sparks. “If you say so.” He wants to take Tony at his word, and he trusts Tony, implicitly, so he must mean it. Except. “At the start of the last loop, you were afraid of me.”

Tony’s back arches and his grip on Steve’s shoulder tightens. “I was startled,” he says, clearly trying to keep his voice light, but instead it creaks, falters, like the pop and hiss of a scratched record skipping.

“You don’t usually startle so easily,” Steve says carefully.

“It was just—the way you were standing, okay? Not everything is about you, Rogers.”

Just like that, they’re back to last names. Steve doesn’t think it’s self-absorption or even how he feels about Tony that makes him sure the issue in question _is_ about him—he’s guessing something about how he bent over Tony reminded him of Siberia—but he can’t be sure how Tony will react to him pointing any of that out. Steve pushing at Tony’s walls is how they got this far, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hate it each time he pushes too far and Tony pulls back to readjust. “If you say so,” Steve says at last, not meaning to repeat himself. Tony settles a little at that. “You got really close with that Peter kid, huh?”

The spark in Tony’s eye shows him that he chose the right topic to change the subject to. “I dunno if close is the right word, but yeah, he’s been doing great.” Tony shifts so he’s leaning against the back of the seat, shoulder to shoulder with Steve. He ends up describing Peter’s takedown of some goon, catching a bullet with his webbing—which leads to an enthusiastic tangent about tensile strength and amino acid sequences—complete with the fluid, expressive gestures Steve associates with a Tony at ease.

After detailing a particularly clever way Peter evacuated a burning building while also taking down three men in knockoff Falcon rigs, Tony rests his head against Steve’s shoulder and says, “You can tell me things about you and Barnes. If you want.”

Steve had been losing himself in Tony’s words, and then in the contact of Tony leaning against him, the tickle of Tony’s hair against his neck—but now he thinks the movement was less about closeness, for Tony, and more a way of arranging himself so he wouldn’t have to look Steve in the eye.

“We’re not going to lose them again,” Tony goes on, resolute.

So Steve tells a story about a girlfriend of Bucky’s from when they were 13 who taught them to double dutch. He talks about swimming in the East River, his mother’s funeral, getting in a fistfight with a group of pickpockets who’d been disguised as mourners and filching from an actual grieving family, about ice cream sodas at Reichert’s Tea Room, drawing maps of the neighborhood and trying to find hidden messages in the arrangement of streets and the shapes of small triangular parks.

In turn, Tony describes a ridiculous parkour move Peter keeps using, tells him about the new War Machine armor he and Rhodes are working on, about Happy’s mysterious new obsession with Outlander (the books as well as the TV show). Steve thinks Tony’s getting bored when he pulls out a tablet and types something, but Tony never pauses in his story about Peter preventing a runaway subway train from crashing, and a minute later one of the empty armors comes in carrying a bowl of microwave popcorn.

Steve laughs out loud, the feeling knocking into him so unexpectedly it feels like a blow. “You programmed the suit to make you food?”

“Well, don’t ask him to debone a chicken or make a béarnaise or something, but yeah, he and Friday do okay at microwaves and toaster ovens,” Tony replies, already digging into the popcorn. “And coffeemakers.”

Steve doesn’t realize that they’ve passed hours that way—comfortable, chatting, completely on the same wavelength—until the proximity alarm goes off and they’re both jumping to their feet, Tony throwing on the glasses that connect him to Friday.

Strange is still out, and Bruce’s talks with the Hulk have yet to bear fruit, so Steve expects things to go wrong when the two huge cylinders pierce their ship and allow Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw to board once more. But while they’ve gotten used to having Strange’s portals and firepower, the team comes together and fills in the gaps instead. Natasha, Sam, and the empty suits take down Cull Obsidian even faster than the time before, and the ambush on Ebony Maw goes off entirely without a hitch. Part of Steve wants to assign credit to the rapport he and Tony have regained, but they’d never really lost that in battle—he can’t begin to imagine everything going on in Tony’s head, but Steve’s never stopped anticipating where Tony will be at any moment, sensing where he’s going to blast and knowing where his shield should be to balance him or reflect a beam or cover him. So maybe it’s just practice: the fact that, even down a teammate, it’s their 8th time through the fight.

They go in guns blazing, so all of Ebony Maw’s attention is on deflecting the bullets and beams, while Natasha, Steve, and the empty suits pounce on him—this time before he has time to recover. He’s not sure whether it’s a hit from the shield, a unibeam from one of the suits, or both that does it, but Ebony Maw is down, and Steve’s barely needs to catch his breath. Bruce’s delighted laughter comes over the ship’s intercom, someone is whooping with glee, Sam and Bucky high-five, and everyone is smiling. Natasha and Bucky start dragging Ebony Maw’s body toward an airlock, Sam excuses himself to check on Strange, and the empty suits are already inspecting the damage to the ship.

Steve turns to Tony, elated. Their shoulders are so close they’re almost touching. The small space between their bodies seems to vibrate. Tony’s faceplate is back to reveal a wide, giddy smile. “How about that,” he says, proud and maybe a little astonished. Steve’s own grin feels goofy and too big for his face, and before he knows it, he’s closed the gap between them and has an arm around Tony’s armored waist; he’s tugging their bodies together with a clank of metal, and then he’s pulling them into a kiss.

Tony makes a brief surprised noise—because he can’t do anything quietly, can he, even this, and that thought is electrifying. Steve feels it tingling and climbing his spine with an energy he pours into the kiss, like he can pass everything he’s feeling into Tony through their mouths—and opens for him. He tastes _warm_ , which isn’t a taste, and sweet and musky and delicious, which are. Steve wants to go deeper, to feel Tony’s tongue, to settle into it and drag his fingers through Tony’s hair, but then Tony pulls away and Steve remembers where they are and who they are and _oh god what has he done now_.

Tony’s eyes are huge. The suit skids along Steve’s fingers as he moves back. Where before the metal felt smooth, like an extension of Tony’s body, now it feels bulky and ungainly, like Steve himself is starting to feel. “What,” Tony pants out. “What the fuck was that?”

Steve isn’t so sure, himself. “I—”

“You’re doing this _now_ ?” Tony sounds furious. Which, Steve thinks, he should be. They’ve barely started to find their footing as friends again, which Steve doesn’t even deserve, and Tony’s _engaged_.

Steve doesn’t know what to say to that. Tony shakes his head, his eyes glittering with what Steve thinks is rage. He turns and walks away down the corridor, his metal-booted footsteps sounding overwhelmingly loud to Steve’s ears. He watches him go, wanting to beat his head against a wall. He’s ruined everything. Again.

And what did Tony mean, _now_? Could he have done this before, before Lagos and everything else? Should he have?

It’s a pointless train of thought.

Steve heads toward the control room to see what he can do to help patch up the ship.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Repairs of the ship continue, Strange awakens, and Loki returns. Tony comes to talk to Steve alone, though he doesn’t want to discuss the kiss they shared. Then they face the Black Order’s ship once more.

Steve and Bucky have cleared most of the corridor pierced by the cylinder the Black Order’s ship, and Natasha and Bruce are covering exposed panels and checking the integrity of the walls where it came through. No one mentions Tony’s absence—Sam has been in and out helping them, then returning to the infirmary to check on Strange—and Steve most definitely doesn’t mention their kiss.

He can’t stop thinking about it, though. It’s a new type of guilt to add to all of the others he carries with him. He has his regrets, like not telling Tony about the deaths of his parents, or wasting the time he had with Peggy. There are failings too, like not reaching Bucky in time that day on the train, not getting through to him on the Insight helicarrier, judging Tony so harshly the first time they met. There’s shame for the times he’s hurt people—hurting Tony is featuring prominently at the moment—the times he was too stubborn to listen or trust or wait. Remorse for the times he wasn’t fast enough to help, heartache for the people he’s let down, sorrow for the people he couldn’t save.

Then there’s the kiss itself. The way Tony smelled, like the metal of the suit, hints of the popcorn they’d been eating, the aftertaste of coffee, a whiff of sweat. The feel of his mouth, the swipe of their lips—no.

No, no, no, that’s not for him.

But he can’t stop thinking that it could have been.

_You’re doing this now?_

It begs the question: when should Steve have kissed him? He wants to say it should have been that moment that Tony woke up on the pavement outside of Grand Central Station and asked if anyone had kissed him. He wants to imagine that everything could have gone right from there, that maybe Ultron wouldn’t have happened, or at least the Accords would have gone differently, and they could have faced it all together, from the start. But even then, Tony hadn’t been for him. He’d been with Pepper. When Thor had been back on Earth, after the Convergence, Tony and Pepper had been on a break, hadn’t they? Or maybe they hadn’t.

Which leaves right before Lagos. Part of Steve wants to cling to the idea that that’s all it would’ve taken for everything to go better. Another part of him just sees all the time he’s wasted, another instance where he’s waited too long.

They’re clearing their fifth corridor of the afternoon—or morning, or night, or whenever it is—when Sam’s voice comes over the intercom to let them know that Strange is awake.

Strange glares when the four of them come in. He’s sitting up, examining an array of glittering mandalas he’s set hovering above his lap. “I’m fine,” he snaps.

“Yeah, so you keep saying,” Sam says from where’s standing at one of the wall consoles.

Tony’s sitting at the desk again, focused on the holograms showing Strange’s heartbeat and blood pressure and whatever else. “You actually sticking around this time, Doc?”

“It’s the loops. Isn’t it,” Steve says, crossing his arms and staring down Strange’s scowl.

Tony’s gaze snaps toward Strange, a frown of understanding moving across his face. “You’re draining yourself to do this.”

“It’s not like there are any other options,” Strange says icily, focus not wavering from the spinning circles and symbols in front of him.

“Were you planning to tell us that resetting the time loops was depleting your energy?” Natasha asks, voice razor sharp.

Strange doesn’t look up. “It doesn’t really matter either way.”

“What does _that_ mean?” Bruce sighs.

“It’s going to work,” Strange says evenly.

“Does that mean you know how many more loops we have?” Sam asks.

“And how many we need to win?” Bucky puts in.

Strange arches an eyebrow and spares them a glance at that. “If I did I wouldn’t tell you. Is that all? I have work to do.”

All further questions are met with similar dismissal. Tony’s avoiding Steve’s eyes again, bustling around the room, conferring with Bruce, and turning his body away from Steve’s every chance he gets. Which, Steve contemplates, is about all he deserves right now.

So he heads back out to work on the ship with Natasha, Bucky, and Sam.

They’ve cleared another half-dozen corridors when Bruce’s voice comes over the intercom to tell them that Loki is about to arrive, and Strange is portalling him into the control room again.

When the escape pod opens, Loki is in the human—or perhaps more accurately, Asgardian—form they’re used to, a crooked smile on his face. His eyes immediately find Strange’s. “I had to your job for you, ‘Sorcerer Supreme,’” he says, taking a graceful step out of the pod. “You’re welcome.”

Bruce is blocking Loki’s path, his arms crossed. A vein in his neck throbs purposefully and distinctively green, and Loki swallows visibly. Steve knows they won’t be seeing much more than that as far the Hulk’s concerned, but as bluffs go it’s a good one.

“You’re not going anywhere or doing anything alone while you’re on this ship,” Natasha says from beside Bruce. That had been part of the agreement they’d all decided on before Loki’s arrival. Natasha, of course, had volunteered. Bucky will be along for the ride, too, since he’s barely leaving Natasha’s side these days anyway. Plus, while Natasha’s outsmarted Loki before, he knows her and what’s important to her now, the better to manipulate her, while Bucky is nearly an unknown quantity to Loki.

Loki just smiles more broadly, his teeth pearly white. “I look forward to it.”

“Not feeding you any of my oats, either,” Bucky mutters. And _that’s_ a thought—it was Loki eating out of Bucky’s hand when he was pretending to be a deer. A thought to deal with later, though. And maybe to tease Bucky about.

“You’re here to help fight Thanos and that’s it,” Steve says. “After that, you’re Thor’s problem.”

“Don’t try anything,” Tony says to Loki, then turns to Bruce. “C’mon Big Green, we have more important shit to deal with than Mischief Managed over here.” Tony turns and leaves, Bruce following with a lingering glance at Loki.

“Ungrateful mortals,” Loki scoffs.

“Let’s go,” Natasha says, tilting her head toward the door. After a moment, Loki follows her into the hall, Bucky coming after her.

Bucky and Natasha just go back to their repair work from earlier, which means that when Steve and Sam return to the corridor they’d been patching up, they find themselves doing so side-by-side with Loki. It’s not really how Steve thought the day would go, or any day for that matter, but at least it’s a distraction from everything else his head has been buzzing with.

Loki’s powers don’t seem to be very useful for the clean-up—or maybe he just doesn’t want to use them for some reason, it’s not really clear to Steve—but he’s stronger than a human and no one has any problem pressing him into the heavy lifting. He’s helping Steve and Sam carry chunks of the cylinder to an airlock when Sam says, “So, Thor said you died, what’s that about?”

“My death may have been… exaggerated.”

“Yeah?” Bucky scoffs. “Been there, man.”

“How’d you do it?” Sam asks.

“My elder sister is the goddess of death,” Loki replies regally, his face cleaved by a wide, lipless smile. The effect is somewhat diminished by the black shards of rubble he’s hefting awkwardly in his arms, a piece of which has fallen off and stuck to his leather epaulet.

“Yeah? So?” Bucky asks.

“So we came to an arrangement,” Loki says.

“Don’t encourage him,” Natasha hisses. “He just wants to brag about how clever he thinks he is.”

Loki appears unfazed. “Clever enough to find you.”

“Thor keeps forgiving you,” Natasha says. “You won’t find us so sentimental.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time your lives, and those of everyone on this ship, hang in balance.” Loki’s still smiling.

Natasha looks at him and matches his smile. “No you won’t. You want to stop Thanos as much as any of us.”

“It _is_ one of the things I hope to get out of spending time on your… _charming_ little vessel.” Loki’s voice is silky smooth even as he hefts an armful of debris onto the floor of the airlock.

Natasha gets Sam and Bucky going on the newest episodes of their favorite medical drama after that. Their enthusiastic bickering—while nearly unintelligible as far as Steve’s concerned—has an easy cadence to it. Plus it utterly excludes Loki, which Steve imagines was Natasha’s intent. It has the side effect of excluding Steve as well—he tried watching an episode or two with Sam once when they’d been stuck in some hotel in the middle of nowhere, but apparently without a full understanding of 13 previous seasons of rich backstory, he was missing a lot of the nuance—but he doesn’t mind. He tries to let the physical exertion occupy him.

Of course, his mind keeps drifting back to Tony.

He tries to remind himself of all the things that drive him crazy about Tony—crazy in the bad way, that is, as he’s having no problems thinking of how Tony tastes or how his eyes crinkle when he smiles or the warm sound of his laughter. Tony doesn’t listen. Tony always thinks he knows what’s best for everyone. He thinks he can be objective and analyze data and look at things intellectually, but when it comes down to it he’s just as stubborn as Steve is. Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t know Steve at all, can’t make sense of anything he says, never gives him the benefit of the doubt, never actually _listens_.

Other times he sees Steve too clearly. _You're a lab rat, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a bottle._ No, that’s not fair, that was before they knew each other. _That shield doesn't belong to you. You don't deserve it._ But that’s not right anymore, either. He gave it back. He said, _It’s yours_.

Remembering all of this is just making him want to talk to Tony more, not less.

Well. At least he’s spending less time thinking about kissing him.

After several hours of clearing the rubble, Steve excuses himself to get some rest. Back in his cabin, he goes over the readings on the gravity cloud, but it isn’t long before the strings of numbers are too much for him. He may not have a better grasp on what the distortion will do, exactly, but at least he’s lulled closer to sleep.

He pulls off his shirt and flops onto his bed. He’s not tired enough, physically, to fall into a deep sleep. He still dreams, unfortunately—the kinds of fitful dreams that come from brief, anxiety-ridden naps. He dreams about ice, about the cold of space, about cryogenic freezing.

He’s awoken by a knock on his door. “Come in,” Steve calls, sitting up.

Tony opens the door and leans inside. “Hey,” he says, tone breezy. “Sam made food, or something resembling it, at least.”

“Great, give me a sec.” Steve gets to his feet, wondering why Tony came to get him in person. He’s still topless, and moves to grab the shirt he was wearing before. Tony’s watching him, he realizes. He can’t decipher the look on his face. He wonders, not for the first time, if Tony is even interested in men. Steve knows what Rebirth did to him; he’s seen how people look at him since, the lists in magazines ranking his body against other celebrities’, the tweets about what cup size his pecs must be, the photos of his backside from his morning runs. And of course, Tony always used to flirt with him—and everyone else, it’s not like he ever thought he was special in that regard. But had he ever _looked_ at Steve? Would Steve have noticed?

 _You’re doing this now?_ Steve’s been reading Tony’s reaction as, yes, anger that Steve would act out like that without his permission, when he’s with Pepper, but also at Steve’s timing. But maybe that last interpretation is more some combination of wishful thinking and finding new ways to torture himself when the truth is a different type of disappointing. Maybe Tony’s never wanted him and never could.

“I was just on my way,” Tony says, as if in answer to Steve’s unvoiced question.

That can’t be the only reason, though. Tony’s here by himself, when Steve knows he’d been in the lab with Bruce. And while they’ve been spending more time together, just the two of them, it’s never been Tony who sought him out. It’s always been Steve, or they’ve ended up the last ones out of a room. So Steve meets Tony head on and says, “I want to apologize about earlier—”

“Lemme stop you right there,” Tony interrupts.

“Tony.” Steve knows he sounds chastising, but he can’t help it.

“We’re fine, there’s nothing to talk about,” Tony insists. “Let’s go join the others for lunch, aren’t you starving with that super soldier metabolism?”

He is, but that’s not the point. “You’re saying you didn’t come here to talk.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “We’re fine.”

“Convincing.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“How about any of the reasons I didn’t hear from you for two years.”

“Like you wanted to hear from me,” Tony scoffs.

“Of course I did.”

“Look, we’re fine, we’ve been fine for this whole little final frontier excursion, we’ve been working together, what’s the problem?”

“Are you seriously asking me that? You’re going to pretend like Leipzig didn’t happen, like Siberia didn’t? Like it doesn’t matter what I did?”

Tony’s eyes flicker over him. “It’s not all on you, Cap.”

“So you admit there’s something to discuss.”

“Can’t we just, you know, hang out, save the universe, and eat crappy space food together? Do we have to go over—all of that? On top of everything else? You’re already tearing yourself apart—which you should really stop doing, by the way—and I don’t really want to remind you of all the ways I’ve fucked up.”

“I don’t think pretending none of it happened really helps,” Steve says, even while part of him is desperately glad Tony wants to pretend that the kiss hadn’t happened.

“Look, I don’t even—sometimes I’m not even sure _what_ I did that fucked everything up so badly. Which of the many things, I mean. But”—Tony takes a steadying breath—“there’s no point in going over all of that now.”

“Of course there’s a point in working things out.”

“It’s over, we won’t let any shit like that happen again, it’s better, it’s fixed, no need to dwell on it.”

There it is. Tony’s priority is always going to be making things better. Repairing, improving, moving forward. That’s the language he understands. “We won’t,” Steve agrees. “I get that you don’t want to talk about this, that you think it’s not the time, but I think we can’t really fix it, entirely, until we have.”

“Then tell me. What was it? What Tony Stark fuck-up was the one that made you give up on—on the Avengers, on everything? Was it just the Accords, was it Ross, or keeping Wanda at the compound? Or have you not trusted me since Ultron?”

Steve’s starting to see what Tony means about it not mattering, because yeah, in a way it was all of that, and more, but none of it sounds very important, right now. But he thinks it will still help for Tony to hear him say why. “I trusted you, Tony. It wasn’t about that, ever.”

“Then why didn’t you listen to me?” Tony sounds exasperated now. “Not just about the Accords. God knows those didn’t go the way I thought they would. Maybe, together, we could have made them better—but they just got worse. That’s on me, I know that. But I didn’t get the benefit of the doubt on anything. Ross was sending special ops after you and Barnes, with orders to shoot—to kill. That’s how Nat and I ended up in Leipzig with 12 hours left to bring you in. And you still didn’t listen.”

“I would listen now. That week was—well, it wasn’t the end of the world, but it was a lot more personal, and none of us handled it well. Not even T’Challa handled it well.”

“A parent’s death can do that to a person, yeah,” Tony says, an edge in his voice.

“Peggy died, too,” Steve reminds him. “I’m not trying to lay blame. It’s the opposite. But you didn’t listen either, when I was telling you about Zemo. It wasn’t about trusting each other, or at least it wasn’t for me. I’m not saying everything else that was going on excuses it, either. I’m saying, it won’t happen again. We’ll be better next time. I’ll be better, I’ll listen to you.”

“You think that’s enough?”

“You’re the one who said it’s going fine. Maybe we learned something.”

“Yeah, okay. If I promise to listen better, too, can this conversation be over?”

“Sure. Yes, fine.”

“Really convincing, Rogers.”

“Can we agree to talk about it more later, at least? If it comes up, or if you have more to say about it. Talk to me. I will, too. No use listening if no one’s talking.”

“Sure, fine,” Tony says, repeating airily the words that Steve said with flat cynicism.

“So if you didn’t come here to talk, why’d you ditch Bruce?”

Tony rolls his eyes. “Hey, Bruce ditched _me_. We heard more from Thor, so Bruce is off sexting him or whatever. And there were some insinuations that I was avoiding you again. And then I was dared to come get you for lunch myself.”

“He has you pegged,” Steve says, heading for the door.

Tony huffs at that and follows him out.

It’s just Bruce and Sam in the mess when they get there. Sam is telling him about things he missed while off Earth, so Steve and Tony join in—describing elections, the Olympics, natural disasters, battles fought by each half of the estranged Avengers. Soon everyone else trickles in and the conversation turns to the gravity cloud and their ship’s course. There’s no way to leave Wakanda any earlier now, so there won’t be any loops where they’ll make it to Knowhere before Thanos does. They’ve heard from Quill; Thanos has taken Gamora, again. There’s no way to get there before the Guardians do, either. If they have to restart the loop, they’ll just head straight for the cloud and hope that’s where they are when the Black Order reaches them. Or even better, that the cloud can keep them from being detected until they want to be.

Strange says nothing throughout the exchange, avoiding all hinted and explicit questions about the loops, and leaves when he’s done eating.

Steve and Tony are describing the Guardian’s team when the proximity alarm goes off.

Tony is suited up and speeding toward the closest airlock before Steve can think of anything to say to him.

Everyone else heads to the control room, passing the three unmanned armors on their way. Steve pulls out his tablet on his way there, tracking Tony’s approach. He’s just made his way through the massive ship’s shields when the first blast hits their own ship. The bulkheads shudder under the impact as Steve barrels into the control room.

Natasha swings into a seat and pulls up manual controls for the ship. Bucky activates the displays showing the state of their shields, the two ships’ relative distance from each other, and the progress Tony and the unmanned suits are making toward the Black Order’s engines.

And they’re getting close, closer than last time. Steve watches the holographic projection of the four Iron Men glide over the hull, approaching firing distance to their target.

The room creaks and echoes with the clang of another blast to their own ship. For a split second, the lights and holograms flicker out before roaring back to life. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Bruce lose his footing momentarily as the walls and floors convulse under the impact of the hit.

Then the projection goes suddenly bright with an explosion—Tony and the suits have hit the engines. The display is overtaken by the white light of the blast, covering the whole area where the figures had been.

The gargantuan Black Order ship erupts silently on the display. From the part of the hologram where the blinding explosion began, a series of blasts detonate one after the other until the whole thing is torn apart. There’s still no sign of Tony or the other armors on the visual display. One of the other charts could be their vitals, but with so much information up at once, Steve has trouble figuring out which it could be.

“Did Stark make it out?” Sam asks, tapping and tugging at parts of the hologram.

Steve’s breath catches. If he didn’t, would Strange reset the loop for that? They’d never discussed what criteria he used to activate the spell, since the other loops had only ever ended in all of them dying or on the brink of death.

“We should be so lucky,” Loki scoffs. Steve crosses his arms over his chest to resist punching him.

Finally, the dazzling rendering of the explosion dims. A single Iron Man zooms toward their ship.

“That’s him,” Steve says. Even rendered in a light projection, he can tell. No one else can fly like that.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ship reaches the gravity cloud. Thor, Rocket, and Groot arrive. They’re soon joined by Wong, Wanda, Vision, Rhodey, T’Challa, Okoye, followed by the rest of the Guardians. While the Guardians reunite on the _Benatar_ , the other humans and Asgardians have a feast and break out the Wakandan wine in celebration of their last night before battle. Steve is glad for the chance to tell his friends what they mean to him, but as he tries to fall asleep, realizes there’s one person he still has loose ends with.

Steve returns to repairing the ship with Sam, Bucky, Natasha, and Loki, and time passes swiftly. It doesn’t feel long before Bruce comes over the intercom to announce that they’ve dropped out of hyperspace in the gravity cloud.

“We’ve cut engines. Our shields are now offline,” he says.

“So we’re just drifting?” Sam asks.

“Movement is… relative,” Bruce replies. “The ship still has momentum after leaving hyperspace. The gravity cloud is in a constant state of flux and is itself moving through the current solar system, which is also moving within the galaxy. And, as the name suggests, gravity is wildly variable in this region of space, so we are being pushed and pulled by various parts of the cloud.”

“How long until the others get here?” Natasha speaks up.

“From when I last heard from Thor, we can expect his ship to reach ours in about an hour. Everyone else is due to arrive sometime in the half-hour after that.”

“That’s if they don’t run into any trouble on the way,” Bucky says darkly.

They fall back into a rhythm after that. Sam tries to draw everyone in with a conversation about baseball, and Steve dutifully responds whenever there’s a lull. Natasha and Bucky chime in occasionally, though mostly they confer with each other in hushed Russian and muffled giggling. Sam expounds on Wanda’s recent interest in basketball, which he now attributes to Vision. This gives Natasha an opportunity to complain about how reckless she thought Wanda was to run off with him.

“I dunno, I think it’s great,” Bucky says.

“You’re such a romantic,” Natasha scoffs. “She put all of us at risk.”

“Could’ve filled us in, at least,” Sam grouses.

Loki carries another inhumanly large armful of rubble toward the airlock, his face a mask of disinterest. As if he wasn’t hanging on their every word, finding ways to manipulate them later.

Steve says nothing on the topic. Privately, he agrees with Bucky, and has harbored similar thoughts of his own since he first learned that that was how Wanda had been spending her time.

He remembers Bruce saying that Steve was the only one who might know where Vision was. The flip phone had rung and Steve had immediately known something was wrong. It had to be, for Tony to actually call him, to go beyond the tentative text messages they’d exchanged on occasion. Even then, something had clutched in his chest at the thought of hearing Tony’s voice. And then it was Bruce instead, telling him that no one could reach Tony, asking him where Vision was, rushing through an explanation of Thanos and the Stones.

 _Tony’s gone_ , Bruce had said, already rushing onto the next crisis. _He said you’d know where to find Vision_. Steve was racing to catch up—Tony gone, chasing after a sorcerer and protecting the Time Stone, _gone_ , and Steve hadn’t been able to talk to him, to make him understand how sorry he was, to repair everything that had gone wrong between them, wasn’t able to fight by his side this time—and to understand how Steve was supposed to locate Vision when Tony himself couldn’t.

Then he’d put it together, the things he’d turned a blind eye to, the way Wanda had been hooked to her own phone before she’d left for Scotland, the way she’d avoided Natasha in the days before her departure. When Steve told Bruce he would head to Edinburgh right then, he hadn’t understood the pang of envy that surged through him at the thought of Vision and Wanda being on their own together.

Sam interrupts his thoughts. “You with us, Cap?”

Steve manages a small smile. “Yep.”

He reminds himself that at least, no matter what happens, he’s been able to talk to Tony. He has the chance, now, to say goodbye to Bucky and Sam and everyone else before they face what’s coming. With that thought to bolster him, he tries to focus back on the repairs.

Steve’s thoughts keep drifting to better days, lingering on all of the ways they were interrupted, cut short by another emergency. His time with Peggy, always pierced by air raid sirens or gunfire. His camaraderie with Bucky and the Commandos, precious flashes of calm for meals or card games cut off by the static of urgent orders coming through the radio or the sound of booted footsteps approaching. Moments of celebration and connection with the Avengers interrupted by calls, of one kind another, to assemble. He remembers the party celebrating the recovery of the Mind Stone, when bickering and bad faith gave way to teasing and laughter. Tony in his waistcoat and tie, pretending to be embarrassed by a story Rhodes had told from their MIT days. The mangled suit that Ultron first took control over, cutting into the rare moment that Steve felt at ease.

It’s with this on his mind that he greets Bruce’s announcement when it comes. “Thor and friends are docking now.”

“Who’s with Thor, again?” Sam asks, covering up a panel he’d been working on and brushing himself down.

“Rocket and Groot. The raccoon and the tree,” Natasha supplies. She turns to Loki. “You ready to see your big brother?”

“Whyever wouldn’t I be,” Loki grumbles.

Bucky goes up the chute toward the docking bay first, and Natasha indicates that Loki is to go next. She clearly hasn’t stopped expecting him to try something. But all he does as they make their way up ladders and trek through the corridors is smirk and smooth down the leather of his outfit.

Having come from the opposite end of the ship, Steve’s not surprised to see that Tony, Bruce, and Strange have beaten them there. When they approach the group standing outside the small craft, the first thing he sees is Strange standing with his arms crossed, gazing at Groot, who is preoccupied by a hand-held game. Tony is kneeling on the ground, showing Rocket what Steve thinks is a disassembled Iron Man gauntlet.

As he gets closer, though, he realizes that what he’d taken for part of Thor’s massive frame, or maybe the folds of his red cape, is actually Bruce. Bruce is plastered to Thor’s chest, the cape tangled around them both, while Thor chuckles and brushes a hand through Bruce’s already messy hair. Steve notices he’s stopped walking to stare; he gives himself a mental shake and keeps moving. Thor gently pushes Bruce away from him to give him a small peck on the forehead. Steve spares a glance for Natasha. He was never sure exactly what passed between her and Bruce, why he left after the fight with Ultron, or what role, if any, she’d had in his departure. He knows she’s with Bucky now and hasn’t exactly been hiding it, but—well, maybe he’s wondering, a bit, what she thinks about two of her teammates being more than friends. Her face is inscrutable, however. Beside her, Bucky looks slightly stunned. Loki is sighing and muttering lowly to himself in what might be another language.

Steve turns back to see that Bruce and Thor are kissing on the lips now—and quite earnestly. Apparently, Tony’s joke about them sexting wasn’t really a joke.

“C’mon you two, break it up,” Tony says, nudging Bruce on the shoulder. “You’re making Cap blush.”

Steve tries to scowl, but Tony’s lopsided grin, Thor’s uninhibited joy, and the soppy expression on Bruce’s face as he pulls away transforms his expression into a smile of his own.

“Good to see you, Thor,” Natasha says.

“I am Groot,” Groot says, not looking up from his game.

“Of course. Everyone, meet my friend, Tree. This one is—”

“Rocket,” Rocket interrupts.

Introductions continue smoothly from there. Thor turns to Loki last. With a thoughtful expression on his face, he digs into a pocket, pulls out what looks like an eye patch, and tosses it at Loki. Scoffing, Loki catches it in one hand. “Yes, yes, I’m here.”

Thor smiles. “And this is my brother, Loki.”

Rocket squints. “I thought you said Thanos killed your brother. You got another brother?”

Thor just shrugs and replies, “Loki does a poor job of staying dead. I find it’s best not to let him think I’ve missed him too much.”

Loki sniffs. “Fear not, Brother, you’ve made it quite clear how I rate in your regard.”

Thor responds to this by throwing back his head in a loud laugh and wrapping Loki in a broad hug.

“Unhand me, you oaf,” Loki insists, but Steve’s pretty sure he sees him holding onto Thor’s back with one hand.

“Is that just the way all siblings act?” Tony asks.

“Yes,” Sam and Thor say, at the same time that Rocket and Bucky say, “No.”

They end up lingering in the docking bay. Bruce announces that he’s managed to work things out with the Hulk, apparently by agreeing to let him out regularly, and not just for battles. “Assuming we live past tomorrow,” he adds.

“No use, talking that way,” Bucky says.

“I look forward to fighting side-by-side with the Hulk once more,” Thor says, tugging Bruce back into his arms. “He and Stormbreaker will lay waste to the armies of Thanos.”

From there, he begins describing the trip to Nidavellir, Rocket joining in occasionally. Thor shows off his new weapon proudly. “I’m fortunate young Groot was there. He made this handle out of his own arm!”

“I am Groot,” Groot grumbles, but he sounds a little shy.

“I am Groot,” Thor replies emphatically.

Bruce starts filling Thor in on everything their ship encountered in all the loops, Tony and Sam jumping in with corrections, embellishments, and teasing. By the time their sister ship arrives, the atmosphere is relaxed, even optimistic. Strange even looks sincerely glad when he greets Wong, and Steve doesn’t know how anyone could keep a smile off their face seeing how happy Rhodes and Tony or Rhodes and Sam are to see each other.

“I blew up a spaceship,” Tony says proudly.

“On purpose?” Rhodes asks.

“How dare you,” Tony pouts.

“You look like shit, Wilson,” Rhodes says.

“Yeah, well, this ship is too fucking quiet,” Sam replies. “Can’t even hear the engines like on a proper plane.”

“That means it’s working correctly,” T’Challa assures him.

The _Benatar_ reaches them soon after. With everyone present, they have a brief discussion and agree to all meet up in person sixteen hours later. They’ll finalize a plan to take down Thanos and retrieve the Gauntlet, then send out the signal that will let Thanos and his forces know their location in the gravity cloud.

Quill, Drax, and Mantis choose to stay onboard their own ship rather than joining the gathering in the docking bay. Drax, who has the comm, says flat-out that Quill is brooding about the loss of Gamora.

Groot sighs and rolls his eyes. “I am Groot.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I’m the captain,” Rocket snaps back.

It turns out this means that the two of them take the small ship Thor came in to rejoin rest of the Guardians, leaving the dozen humans (plus Vision and the two Asgardians) to themselves.

“Battle tomorrow, then,” Bruce says after Rocket and Groot are gone.

“Indeed,” T’Challa says after a moment.

Silence stretches on. Steve sees Tony cross his arms and shift weight from one foot to another.

“Fellow warriors!” Thor booms at last. “Let’s share a final feast before we meet our fate!”

“Cheerful,” Bucky comments from beside Steve, quietly enough that probably only he and Natasha heard.

Okoye says something to T’Challa in Xhosa, and he chuckles lowly.

“Food’s this way,” Sam offers, leading the way toward the mess hall.

Someone has found a case of Wakandan honey wine, and the tentatively celebratory mood from the docking bay soon transforms into a party. Sam and Vision pour drinks and throw together some finger food. Someone’s even got music playing over the intercom.

At first, everyone seems to be seeking out those they don’t know well. Thor is chatting with Okoye, Strange seems to be showing some sort of magic to Natasha, Wanda and Bruce are having a hushed talk in a corner, and Steve finds himself in a conversation with Rhodes and Loki.

“How long have Bruce and your brother been dating?” Rhodes asks.

“I prefer not to discuss it,” Loki says.

“Oh yeah?” Rhodes smirks. “You mean you didn’t know they were together either? Or you just hate hearing about it?”

“I simply prefer to discuss topics of greater intellectual value,” Loki insists.

“Okay,” Rhodes says. “So, Loki. You read the latest New Yorker?”

“I’m a bit behind, I’m afraid,” Loki replies. “The last one I read had a large elephant on the cover. I recall an article about the dependence of the economy of Texas on oil drilling.”

Which is how Steve comes to find himself witness to a discussion between Rhodes and Loki on fossil fuels, Handel’s “Messiah,” and some controversy about a painting at the Met. After being briefly miffed at not having anything to contribute, he finds he’s enjoying not feeling pressed to say anything, and is even a little disappointed when Loki excuses himself to get another drink.

Fortunately, Sam arrives before Steve has to make much conversation with Rhodes on his own.

“Hey Steve,” Sam says as he sidles up. “What’s the difference between the Boy Scouts and the US Army?”

“Sam,” Steve sighs. He’s heard this one before.

“Boy Scouts have adult supervision,” Rhodes finishes. He and Sam high-five.

“Okay,” Steve says. “How do you tell your date with a pilot is halfway through?” Before they have time to answer, he finishes, “He says, ‘But enough about me. Wanna hear about my plane?’”

“How many Army guys does it take—”

Sam is cut off by Natasha’s arrival. She comes up behind Rhodes and Sam, slinging an arm over each of their shoulders. “Excuse us, Steve,” she says. “I need these two to explain something to T’Challa.”

Bucky approaches Steve before he has a chance to wonder how the rest of Sam’s Army joke goes. “My girlfriend can kill a man with her thighs. What do you say, should I be terrified, or turned on?”

“Which does Natasha think it should be?” Steve asks, accepting the fresh glass of wine Bucky offers him.

“If I knew that, I’d know the answer,” Bucky complains.

They fall into easy conversation after that. They’ve fortunately moved on from the topic of Natasha to reminisce about the foods they miss the most when Natasha and Sam join them. When Steve looks up from a discussion of the strangest ice cream flavors they’ve ever tried, he sees that everyone has drifted into more familiar groupings. Vision is feeding Wanda popcorn. Okoye and T’Challa seem to be trying to include Wong and Strange in conversation. Bruce, Thor, Loki, Tony, and Rhodes are playing poker.

The food is all gone and a second case of honey wine has just made its appearance when Wanda and Vision begin making their rounds of the room to say good night.

“Have fun,” Natasha says sweetly as they leave. Bucky elbows her.

Okoye excuses herself soon after, then Thor, who takes Loki with him. “Tomorrow we do glorious battle,” Thor says by way of farewell. T’Challa is next to depart, followed by Strange and Wong.

Steve is thinking of trying to join the poker game still going on, but instead he watches one hand dealt after another, while beside him Bucky and Sam bicker about Game of Thrones. Before he knows it, Bruce, Tony, and Rhodes are excusing themselves for the night.

“See you all for breakfast and tactics, I guess,” Rhodes says as everyone exchanges hugs and slaps on the back.

“God, I hope all this wine helps me fall asleep,” Bruce grouses.

Natasha smiles. “I’m sure Thor can help wear you out, Doc.”

“Admit it, Romanoff, you became a spy because you love gossiping about other people’s business,” Sam says.

“Is there any other reason?” she asks.

Steve emerges from an embrace with Bruce and moves toward Tony, unsure what to say or how he’ll be received, only to find Bruce stepping between them to shake hands with Sam. Before he knows it, the three of them are gone, and Bucky is suggesting they go to Steve’s room for one more drink. A full bottle of wine is located in the clutter that’s overtaken the mess hall, a disagreement breaks out over whose used glasses are whose, and then at last the four of them emerge into the corridors with clean mugs and a corkscrew.

“Steve has the best room,” Sam says when they arrive. His face is serious for a moment, then breaks out into giggles. He’s drunker than Steve realized.

“Pretty sure they’re all the same,” Bucky says, sitting down and opening the wine. “Except yours, Wilson, I think that one’s supposed to be a supply closet.”

“Fuck off,” Sam says, still chuckling. He watches Bucky pour his glass, then raises it before he has time to finish pulling the bottle away. Wine sloshes down the side. “A toast! To goddam super-people.”

Bucky raises his glass too. “To spies and dumbasses.”

Natasha smirks. “To doing the right thing.”

“To vibranium,” Bucky adds.

“C’mon, Cap,” Sam says, whining a little. “You got a speech for us?”

“To friends,” Steve says. They clink glasses.

“Bruce and Thor, huh,” Bucky muses after he takes a sip.

“Didn’t see that one coming,” Sam agrees.

“Speak for yourself,” Natasha says.

Sam looks thoughtful. “Do you think when Banner—”

“Nope,” Steve interjects quickly. “Not going there.”

“Hey. You guys. We’re in space,” Bucky says. “In space!”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Subtle subject change, darling.”

“On a spaceship!” Bucky persists.

Steve looks between the three of them and grins. “I’m glad you’re all here,” he says.

Natasha’s eyes swivel to his quickly, and for a moment he feels sheepish, but then her face softens and Bucky and Sam smile back at him and she says, “Me too,” and Steve thinks they understand what he meant.

One glass of wine turns into two. Sam tells an impassioned story that Steve can’t quite follow but seems to involve Riley, a camel, and several marines, and Sam assures him that his takeaway should be that the Air Force is the most important and competent branch of the military. Bucky and Natasha demonstrate a bizarre and frankly terrifying two-person variation on the stab-between-the-fingers trick, until Sam gets fed up and “confiscates” Bucky’s knife.

No one directly mentions the battle they’ll be facing the next day. Steve’s trying not to think about what happened the last time they faced Thanos, and is briefly envious that no one else at his table remembers it.

Instead, they talk about past victories. In between tales of triumph, they turn to trivialities—bickering about coffee flavors, arguing about daytime television, contradicting and talking over each other with reminiscences of their all-to-recent stint on the lam.

There’s brief talk of a third glass of wine, but Bucky and Natasha are exchanging those unmistakable, lingering looks of theirs, so Sam smirks and says, “Let’s let these lovebirds get their night together. I’m gonna hit the sack too,” and they all get to their feet.

They hug each other one by one. Bucky’s last out the door, and when he has his arms around Steve, he says into his ear, “It’s gonna be alright, Stevie.” When he pulls away, he smiles a smile Steve last glimpsed in 1945 and thought he would never see again.

Steve’s cabin is quiet and empty without them. The difference is abrupt and leaves him feeling cold. He tries to get into bed but just sits on the edge, facing the rest of his room, staring at nothing. He shouldn’t feel so alone when he’s gotten the chance to say goodbye like that, to let everyone know what they mean to him.

Well, not everyone.

Thinking of seeing Tony is making him more apprehensive than the next day’s battle, right now. Which is absurd, because the battle is, quite literally, for the fate of the universe. It’s more important than anything Steve’s thinking or feeling. But maybe that’s the problem; that scale is too huge, too much to comprehend. Even when it’s already happened—even when he saw the footage of helicopters falling out of the sky, cars careening out of control when their drivers vanished, workers being crushed under equipment that was suddenly being operated by no one—he only ever measured it by Bucky, by Sam, by T’Challa.

He wishes the ship’s systems could tell him whether Tony’s alone in his room, whether he’s still awake.

He wishes a lot of things, really.

The wishing is what gets him to his feet and moves his legs down the corridor to Tony’s room. Then he’s paralyzed for a moment, imagining Tony’s face when he sees him there, remembering the fury in his eyes after Steve had ruined everything all over again.

He knocks lightly on the door. He can hear shuffling. He braces himself for anger, annoyance, rejection. For Rhodes or Bruce or someone else to be inside and wonder what Steve’s doing there—or worse, know exactly what he’s doing there.

The door opens and Tony is standing in front of him in an undershirt and the jeans he was wearing earlier. He looks a little surprised, maybe, and not much else.

“Tony, I…” He’s frozen again. There are so many things he wants to say. Things he can’t find the words for, things he can’t ever say out loud, things that will only broaden the distance between them, and he’s not sure which is which. “I’ve said goodbye to everyone else, in case—in case. And I wanted to say it to you. And apologize for—before.” He’s not sure if he means the kiss, or Siberia, or Leipzig, or not stopping Thanos when he came to Wakanda, or something else, or maybe a combination of all of it. “I know we can fight side by side. But—you said you forgave me before, that we were friends, and I know I haven’t always been a good friend, but I’d like to have the chance to do better, when all of this is over.”

Tony’s expression hasn’t changed. Only his eyes are moving, darting over Steve’s face. Steve feels his hair stand on end as Tony examines him. “Come in,” Tony says finally.

Steve follows him inside. The door slides shut behind him with a smooth, soft glide. The cabin is nearly identical to his own, though the curtain over the bed is in a different color scheme and there are empty coffee mugs scattered on the floor, the fold-out table, and on one of the chairs. Steve sinks into one of the empty seats. “I shouldn’t have kissed you. I don’t know what I was thinking. I know you’re with Pepper, and I can promise it won’t happen again. I want to make it up to you. All of it, anything I can do. I know you said you accepted my apology about what happened in Siberia and for not listening to you earlier about everything else but I feel like I need to say it again—”

“Okay, let me stop you right there,” Tony says. He uncrosses his arms, holds them at his sides for a moment, and then puts them both behind his back. He tilts his head and just like that, Steve is transfixed by the movement of his exposed throat, the brightness of his eyes, the way one of his bare feet is tapping against the floor. “First of all, I’m not with Pepper, we ended things—several times, I might add—the morning before we left Wakanda.”

“I’m sorry, Tony,” Steve breathes. “I’m sure she’ll understand, when you get back. You always work things out.” Is he really reassuring Tony that he and Pepper will get back together? If it’s what Tony needs—and he knows Tony loves Pepper, he’s seen how he looks at her, how he lights up when he talks about her, the little smile that plays on his face when he’s thinking about her—then yes, he is.

“Right,” Tony says, frowning. “Not really the point. Here’s the point: you need to stop beating yourself up about” —he unfastens his hands from behind his back and gestures broadly with his arms— “all of this.” Now that his hands are free, his whole body is shifting more, too. He moves from foot to foot, redistributing his weight, moving closer to Steve as he does. “You have to take care of yourself, give yourself a break, and I don’t know, just—fucking forgive yourself, okay. I can’t do that for you. You have to let yourself be happy. Can you do that?”

Steve blinks at him, taking in everything he’s said, watching the motion, the dynamism of his limbs.

“Steve,” Tony says, and hearing him say his name sends a shiver up Steve’s spine. “Can you do that?”

Steve realizes he’s been holding in a breath. When did he stop breathing? He lets out a gust of air and says, “I can try.”

“Okay.” Tony takes a step toward him. “Okay. I think…” He swallows, takes another step forward. “I think you shouldn’t be alone right now. And I know _I_ don’t want to be alone right now either. So…?”

Steve stares. “Are you—I mean. Yes.”

Tony gives him a small smile and takes his hand. “C’mere.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony has asked Steve to stay in his room with him. Steve doesn’t know what to expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is almost entirely smut. If you don’t like or read smut, you can skip this chapter and see the chapter endnotes to see the few plot points you missed.

 

Steve follows Tony to the bed alcove, feeling lightheaded. He’s not sure what’s happening, but he’s not going to ruin it. He’s going to enjoy whatever Tony is offering him, he’s going to treasure it for as long as he can.

Tony leans against one of the upholstered walls of the nook and pulls Steve against him. He nuzzles his face into Steve’s shoulder and takes a deep breath—not a calming one, like he’s steadying himself, but slow nonetheless, and Steve thinks maybe he’s trying to catch his scent. Steve breathes him in in turn, relishing the closeness. He can feel breath move through Tony’s body, feel his lungs inflate and then empty. He tries to cherish, to celebrate each puff of air moving in and out of them both, knowing how easily it might all slip away.

“I missed you,” Tony says over Steve’s shoulder.

He doesn’t care if Tony can’t look at him when he says it, it just matters that he’s said it. He’s in Tony’s arms, and he can’t think how he ever made it through a night before a battle any other way. “I’m here,” Steve says.

“Now would be a good time to kiss me, you know.” There’s a smile in Tony’s voice now.

And how can Steve refuse that?

Gently, he pushes himself off of Tony. Now he gets to see his face. And there he is: the impish curve of his lips, the light in his eyes. Steve brushes Tony’s hair off his forehead, runs his fingers down his jaw. He leans in slowly, and Tony’s lips part for him.

Their faces are pressed together then. The way they’re supposed to be, Steve thinks. He wonders what his beard feels like to Tony, wonders what Tony’s would feel like if his own face were bare.

It’s a better kiss than before. For one thing, Steve’s fully in the moment this time, savoring the taste, the feeling of lips against lips, skin against skin. And Tony is present too, kissing back, his body pliant, one hand already tugging at the hem of Steve’s shirt.

This answers the question of whether Tony is interested in men, at least.

Not that it matters beyond tonight. Because if they both survive the coming conflict, Tony will go back to Pepper, the way he always does.

Their limbs tangle as they peel the clothes off of each other’s bodies, Tony’s fingernails scraping down Steve’s back the moment his shirt is gone, Steve’s hands lingering on the globes of Tony’s rear as he tugs his pants off of him. Tony’s breath puffs against Steve’s skin, warm and humid after the cool, still air of the ship. He gets to see Tony like this, he marvels. For tonight, at least, Tony trusts Steve to take care of him.

Each kiss Steve steals feels like something he’s getting away with, even as Tony tugs him closer and pulls Steve’s bottom lip into his mouth. Emboldened, he starts a trail of kisses down Tony’s neck. He’s rewarded by Tony arching his back and exhaling a low groan. The arc reactor is nearly flush against his sternum. The soft blue light it emits is otherworldly in its beauty, reminding Steve of how far they are from home and what they’re out here to do. He licks and sucks and nibbles his way down Tony’s body, wanting to bite harder and leave a mark and knowing that’s not for him, that Tony isn’t really his.

He reaches Tony’s hips and is overwhelmed by the scent of him, heady and pungent. Tony is completely shaved, which maybe shouldn’t surprise him—he knows a lot of people like it now, and it seems just like Tony to make things clean and easy for his partners, except that reminds him of Pepper, who Steve does _not_ want to be thinking about right now—but it dazzles him anyway, the way he’s so exposed, that much more naked and bare to Steve’s gaze.

“Can I…” Steve starts, still nuzzling his way down.

Tony doesn’t need him to finish. “Please,” he says, encouraging, not begging. Steve wonders what Tony begging for him would be like.

At first Steve just focuses on the head of Tony’s cock, caressing it with his lips and enjoying the answering thrust of Tony’s hips and the small, gulping moans he makes. It’s been awhile since he's done this, but—if Tony’s enthusiastic sounds as he swipes with his tongue and sucks his way down are anything to go by—he’s making up for any lack of technique with enthusiasm. Steve swallows him down to the hilt and Tony clutches at his hair and makes an aborted thrust with his hips, but Steve wouldn’t mind if he pushed further still. He tries to communicate this by grabbing a handful of Tony’s ass and using it to shove his dick against the back of his throat. Tony makes a gratifying, inarticulate noise in response. Is Tony full letting go? Is he even louder when he does?

Steve loses himself in the feeling of Tony inside him, in the humming bursts of sound that keep coming out of Tony’s mouth. He’ll never get tired of how Tony’s cock slides back and forth over his tongue, the weight of it inside him, the way it fills him up and nudges the back of his throat. He’s not sure how much time has passed when Tony says, “Would you. Do you want to fuck me?”

Steve pulls off of Tony’s cock slowly, lightheaded and elated. God, Tony would let him do that? “Yes,” he manages to say. Tony’s smile lights up his eyes. His pupils are blown wide so there’s only a hint of the brown irises, glittering with sparks of light. Steve feels those sparks in his bones, under his skin, in every sinew of his muscle, like he’s about to ignite with feeling. Tony is going to set him aflame, and Steve can’t wait to burn with him.

Tony, of course, has brought everything they need--thought to pack all this for their last-minute trip to space. He makes a whining sound when Steve gets up to fetch the lube, even though Tony’s the one who asked him to get it and directed him to the duffel with specific instructions as to what pocket to search. Steve takes his time returning though, enjoying the focus and heat of Tony’s gaze as he clambers back into the bed. He pours slick over his hand, takes a moment to warm it between his fingers, and watches Tony in turn. The sight of Tony’s naked body—and it is _naked_ , on display, bare and inviting, not nude like an artist’s model, posed, still, at work, but languid and revealing—is wondrous to behold. Tony’s cock twitches, as if noticing his scrutiny, making Steve’s breath catch. It’s dark and golden, warm-hued all the way up and rosy at the tip, glistening with Steve’s spit. He reaches into the crease of Tony’s ass, spreading lube over his entrance, feeling Tony shudder under him. Tony trusts him to do this, all of this, he thinks, gently pressing against the tight ring of muscle there, listening to Tony’s breaths and waiting to feel him relax against it. When he does, he slides all the way in, relishing the low moan Tony exhales in answer. It’s not long before he’s fucking him in earnest with two fingers, not just easing him open. Tony curls onto his side, legs wide open, hooks one ankle over Steve’s shoulder. Steve reaches his free hand down to pour on more lube and slides a third finger inside of him. Tony bucks, calls out his name, and Steve never wants him to stop.

“You like that?” Steve pants, feeling breathless at the spectacle unfolding before him.

“Ye-es,” Tony groans out. The low, breathy timbre of his voice makes the hair on the back of Steve’s neck stand on end.

Even as Tony thrusts against him and clenches around him, doing his best to fuck himself on Steve’s hand, he can feel the rest of Tony’s muscles uncoil. He’s becoming more and more pliant under Steve’s hands, like Steve’s working him into another state of matter entirely.

“Steve.” Tony is gasping, panting. “Get that dick inside me _now_.”

“Tony,” Steve breathes.

“Don’t need a condom,” Tony goes on. Steve draws his fingers out, slow and steady, caresses them gently around the rim of Tony’s hole. Tony’s breath stutters for a moment, his eyes fluttering. He catches it, continues on, “You can’t get anything, I don’t have anything. So chop chop, I need cock.”

Steve chuckles despite himself. He slides his hand over one of Tony’s cheeks, down his inner thigh. Gently, he presses against Tony’s hips and shoulder so he’s flat on his back. Tony lets himself be moved wherever Steve puts him, watching him through heavy-lidded eyes.

He’s really going to do this, he really gets to have this, Steve thinks. Somehow, he keeps his movements smooth as he slings one leg over Tony’s hips, straddling him, and bends over to press a kiss to his neck—

But that’s when Tony’s whole body goes rigid. His legs flail wildly and he raises both his arms up over his head defensively. The abrupt intake of breath he makes is sharp, _frightened_ , and Steve reels back, like the wind’s been knocked out of him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, are you okay?” he asks, voice shaking. He backs away, not realizing how far he’s gone until his back hits the upholstered wall of the bed alcove.

Tony’s eyes are wild and his breath is ragged. “I’m fine,” he finally says. “I’m fine, it’s not your fault, give me a sec.” He takes several deep breaths, carefully lowers his arms.

“What happened?” Steve asks weakly. “Can I help? Should I go?”

Tony closes his eyes for a moment, inhales heavily. “You were right before,” he says. He opens his eyes and for a split second his gaze snaps to Steve’s, but just like that it’s gone, focused somewhere over his shoulder instead. “When the loop had reset and you were trying to help me up. I wasn’t just startled. But it’s not what you think, okay? I’m not scared of you.” He’s still speaking into the air to one side of where Steve’s sitting, but he says it firmly. _Tony Stark isn’t afraid of anything_ , that tone of voice says.

“I just don’t like being reminded of certain things,” Tony goes on. Certain things, right. Things like the last time Tony was on his back and Steve was bending over him, cracking open his suit of armor. _Not your fault_ , like Steve believes that for a second. “It’s not a big deal. Just, don’t, I don’t know. Loom over me.”

“Okay,” Steve says immediately. He gets the feeling he’s agreeing to more than just that.

“Okay,” Tony repeats, meeting Steve’s eye again. “I do want this, okay? I want you to run this show, alright. Just, not that specific way, I guess. Don’t—don’t go, don’t stop.”

“Tony,” Steve breathes.

“Just come back here and fuck me.”

“How about on your side,” Steve suggests, making his way back to Tony. When he reaches him, he sets his hand on Tony’s hip, needing to feel his skin, needing to be reassured that Tony is there and whole and with him. “And me on mine. I want to see your face.”

Tony’s head jerks a little at that. Like he likes that idea, too, Steve thinks. “You’re the boss,” Tony says, his voice husky and throaty, so low it makes Steve shiver.

He gets them into position, admiring how flexible Tony is, with his knees practically to his ears. Tony seems to like when Steve moves his limbs for him. His breath is even now and his smile is sweet, almost hopeful, as he watches him. That terrified look on Tony’s face had almost put an end to the proceedings for Steve, but arranging them like this is rapidly making him hard again.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Steve asks as he situates himself opposite Tony. _That you trust me to do this,_ he means.

Tony is clearly barely restraining himself from rolling his eyes. “I should’ve known you’d be all about enthusiastic consent. Yes, please fuck me on your giant hard cock, like I have literally asked you to do a total of three times now. We might all die tomorrow—or be alive to watch everyone else die, bit of a toss-up there—and I would like to take this moment to celebrate being alive, having a plan that might actually save the universe, and the fact that your cock is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” When he finishes this pronouncement, he angles himself so he can draw himself down over it.

Steve chuckles and gasps at the same time, amused at Tony’s words and shuddering at the way the head of his cock brushes Tony’s hole. He manages to answer Tony’s movement with a roll of his hips. He thinks he hears Tony whisper, _Please_.

Steve takes the base of his cock in hand and guides it between Tony’s cheeks, enjoying the tremble of Tony’s thighs as he holds them up. He holds it there for a moment, just barely breaching into him, listening to the way Tony whines and enjoying how he tries to grind down onto it.

Finally he slides all the way in. He’s fully sheathed, he’s really doing this.. Tony’s so tight lying on his side like this. Steve takes a moment to just breathe, to feel the incredible, slick heat surround him.

“C’mon you tease,” Tony breathes out. “Let’s go, give it to me.”

As if Steve could even imagine refusing him when he says things like _that_. He starts to move, slowly—not just because he’s afraid of hurting Tony if he goes too hard or too fast, but also because being inside of him is nearly overwhelming and every centimeter he moves is a new swell of sensation. Tony wraps a leg around his back and sighs, a blissful exhale that might contain the word _Yes_.

It doesn’t take long for Steve to lose himself in the motion of thrusting in and out. He thinks of waves ebbing and cresting and crashing rhythmically. He slides forward and back in the perfect hot tightness of Tony’s body. Tony pulses and clenches around him and it’s too much—but in a way that feels right and good, like this is what his enhanced body was made for: to hold onto this man, to feel every part of him, to be at home inside him, to memorize the topography of his skin, to know his breaths and his cadence and every sweet little moan that he exhales.

“God, you feel amazing,” Steve pants.

Tony shifts his limbs in loose, languid movements, then arches his face toward Steve’s. In answer, Steve leans forward and catches his mouth in a kiss. Tony slides his tongue into his mouth and everything Steve feels is Tony, hot and wet and _his_.

“Love how you kiss me,” Tony says, his words slurring a little.

“Love kissing you,” Steve replies, breathless. “You taste so good.”

“Mmm, so do you.”

Steve pants, rocks his hips against Tony. His pace is picking up, matching the build of pleasure that’s blossoming inside him. Tony is gasping over Steve’s skin, throaty grunts that it seems he can’t help but make. He can feel Tony’s own erection pressing against his stomach, firm and warm. Tony is glorious like this, Steve thinks. His face is always beautiful, arched planes and angles, the contrast of smooth skin and coarse dark hair, the sparks that light his eyes. But like this is even better. The view Steve has this way, and the gentle spread of Tony’s features as he relaxes and opens, is perfect.

Perfect, gorgeous, brilliant, so tight and warm for him.

“Yes,” Tony breathes. “For you.”

Steve hadn’t realized he’d been saying that out loud. “Feel so good around me.”

He reaches a hand between them to stroke Tony’s cock and is rewarded with a groan that stutters and hitches in Tony's throat. “Fuck me harder. Don’t hold back, Rogers.”

Steve stills for a moment. Tony whines. “It’s Steve. When my dick is inside you, you’ll call me Steve.”

Tony’s inhale trails into a moan and then into a broken laugh. “Yessir, Steve. Steve, Steve, Steve,” he babbles. “Now fuck me like you mean it. Leave me some bruises to remember you.”

Steve complies. How could he not? He bucks his hips faster, harder. He slides his fingers down Tony’s full, heavy cock, wraps it instead over Tony’s waist, trying not to worry about pressing too hard. He nibbles on Tony’s lips, nips at his cheeks, sucks and licks and bites his throat and clavicle.

“Yes,” Tony says, quiet and thick and heated. “Steve, Steve.”

Hearing Tony say his name that way is intoxicating. He could do this forever, the slip and slide of their bodies, the breaths they share, the weight of Tony’s cock as Steve takes it in his fist. The privilege of touching Tony like this. This is real, Steve’s really here in Tony’s bed, snagging his teeth over the skin of his neck, tasting his sweat, rising up to meet him as he pushes in, in, in.

Tony is pushing back, too, picking up the pace, using his body to urge him onward. Steve’s hand tightens around Tony’s cock. He pumps his hips and his fist and hears Tony’s breaths go even deeper.

“’m so close,” Tony says thickly.

With those words Steve feels the approach of his own orgasm building inside him. He thrusts harder still, buries his face in Tony’s shoulder. His rhythm is going erratic as he moves and pushes inside of Tony. Tony arches his back, throws back his head. He lets out a strangled cry and Steve echoes it. Tony’s shuddering and arching and coming. His expressive face is a picture of pleasure and exultation. Steve feels wet warmth spill and spread over his stomach, and his own climax pulses through him.

They gasp together, Steve clutching Tony’s waist. He watches Tony’s lax mouth, the hazy, half-lidded look in his eyes.

“You,” Tony breathes, looking up at him. “You’re something else, you know that?”

Steve chuckles and reaches his hand up to run his fingers through Tony’s hair. His skin is damp, and, now that he’s stilled and catching his breath, slightly chilled. He leans into Tony’s warmth, watching him blink and smile contentedly. Steve pulls out slowly, and Tony tangles their legs together.

“You’re very good at that,” Tony says through a lazy smile.

Steve thinks he could get even better, if Tony would let him, but instead of saying so, he smiles and kisses him. He gets lost in that, for a moment, one hand running over the compact muscles of Tony’s arm, the other on the ample curve of his ass. He remember what Tony said about bruises and feels heat pool in his groin, grips and squeezes that perfect roundness, digs his fingernails in. Tony gasps and Steve feels a smile against his lips. Then Tony dives deeper into the kiss, swirling his tongue. They’re pressed so close together now that Steve can feel the arc reactor against his own chest. Tasting Tony is glorious and Steve wishes he never had to stop, that this could be theirs forever, that war and dust and blood would leave them to this night of skin and warmth.

Tony pulls away, gazes at Steve through his eyelashes. It makes Steve’s skin feel electrified and his breath catch. Tony glances down then, and Steve realizes that he’s already hard again.

“Sorry,” he says quietly.

“Nuh uh.” Tony presses a finger to his lips. “That? Is beautiful. And I wish I’d thought to put it in my mouth earlier.” He reaches down and takes Steve in hand. “This will have to do.”  

Steve gasps. Tony seems to know just how to touch him. He takes Tony’s face in his hand and presses their lips together. It isn’t long before he’s rocking into Tony’s hand, jostling his whole body as Steve grinds against him.

“Beautiful,” Tony says again, his mouth so close to Steve’s own that he can feel the vibration of the words on his lips. “Feel good?”

“Yes, yes,” Steve chokes out.

“Let me hear you, Steve.”

Steve groans out loud at that, as Tony’s fingers stroke and clasp and curl over and around his cock. He can feel the calluses on his hand. Their mouths are soft and slow against each other even as Tony steadily pumps his fist. Steve feels tension building again. He’s on the edge, can feel his balls getting tighter. “Oh God, going to—”

“Yes,” Tony breathes.

Steve moans out loud, his eyes roll back and his eyelashes flutter. He feels his climax rushing out of him, shuddering through the final, slow strokes of Tony’s hand, come streaking over their abdomens and Tony’s fingers.

Tony watches him pant. “Wow.”

Before Steve has a chance to reply, Tony has pushed Steve onto his back. He’s bent over him, trailing his mouth down his chest. Steve starts when he feels Tony’s tongue—he’s licking and lapping up the come that’s all over his stomach.

“Tony,” Steve whispers.

Tony just hums and continues cleaning Steve with his mouth. He works his way down, then presses a small kiss over Steve’s softening cock.

“C’mere,” Steve says, tugging Tony up toward his face.

“Bossy,” Tony says, sounding gleeful. He lets himself be pulled up Steve’s body, settles over his chest in a sprawling embrace. “Lucky you’re so pretty.”

“Thought you said I was good at somethin’ else, too.”

“Hmm.” Tony nuzzles his face against Steve’s neck. “I’ll write you a full evaluation if we survive the next 24 hours.”

Steve loves feeling Tony on top of him. Beyond the precious press of flesh and the comforting weight of Tony’s body, it means Tony isn’t ready for Steve to leave. Maybe even expects them to fall asleep like this. When he’d come to Tony’s room, he hadn’t expected much. Not this, certainly. Nothing with Tony is what he predicts. Even if he’d dared to imagine sex with him, it couldn’t have matched this intensity. It wouldn’t have included Tony’s fear, either, he thinks darkly. But that was an intimacy too, Tony letting him see that, even explaining it.

Steve had come here wanting to say goodbye. Is this part of that? This closeness, this time they get together. It will be, if Thanos overpowers them all again tomorrow.

He isn’t afraid of what the battle will bring, not really. There’s something calming in knowing that they’ve rallied together as well as they possibly can. The disparate forces of the estranged Avengers, of T’Challa and his resources, of the Guardians and Asgardians, united and far from the vulnerable homes they’re protecting. And, Steve thinks, he’s already learned what it’s like to lose. He’d lost Bucky and Sam, and he’d thought Tony was gone too—gone, after two years of barely being in touch, of thinking Steve hated him.

Now, if it all disappears again, he’ll have had this, at least.

Tony shifts, stretches. “Okay, I’m all sticky.” He sighs, rolls off of Steve onto his back. “And thirsty.”

Steve finds himself chuckling again, startled out of his melancholy thoughts. Tony directs him to a water bottle and a dirty tee to use for cleaning them up. He drinks as Steve wipes him down, then does himself. Steve sets the bottle on the floor and sits for a moment, hovering in indecision. Should he get up? Get dressed?

Tony flings an arm around Steve’s waist and pulls him backward into the bed. “You’re staying.”

As if there’s anywhere else Steve wants to be. “Bossy,” he huffs.

“You love it,” Tony scoffs. Which is maybe truer than he realizes. “Go to sleep, Steve.”

Steve shuffles further into the bed, pulls the blankets up over them. Tony nestles against his shoulder, his breathing already evening out.

Tomorrow, they’ll get up, get dressed, and head out with their team. One way or another, Tony won’t touch him like this again.

Steve sleeps.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s what happens other than smut: Steve figures hooking up is a one time thing and that if they make it back to Earth, Tony will get back together with Pepper. Tony is freaked out for a moment and reminded of Siberia when Steve is bending over him, and they talk about it briefly. Steve is touched that Tony will even talk about this with him, and is letting see Steve this vulnerable side of him. Finally, Tony insists that Steve spend the night with him, and they fall asleep.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers and their allies face Thanos in battle on one of Thanos’ spaceships. The gravity cloud is slowly tearing it apart, Thanos has 5 of the 6 Stones, and Steve’s not sure where most of his friends are—or if they’re even still alive. Thor makes it to Thanos but things don’t go quite to plan. The Time Stone is activated a final time, and the Infinity Gauntlet is used once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Arukou ([tumblr](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/), [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou)) for beta of these last two chapters!

Steve has that dream again, the huge paper wider than his own wingspan, himself scratching away at it, rending it open with the blunt end of a pencil. This time it’s dust and ash and cinders that spill from the rent fibers of the page, gray and crumbling and settling into every crevice of his skin.

He blinks himself awake, remembers where he is, slowly pulls himself into sitting. The motion must wake Tony—or maybe just spurs him into movement, but it’s not like Tony to stay still once he’s awake—because he stretches, pulling himself taut, then settles his arm back over Steve’s waist. He nuzzles his face into Steve’s back, murmuring, “Mmm, you’re warm.”

It takes all of Steve’s willpower to drag himself out of bed, after that. He watches Tony get dressed, trying to memorize the moment, and Tony grins at him, preening. “Like what you see?”

“Yes,” Steve says, and kisses him. Their last kiss, he thinks. He has to believe, in this moment, that they will both—that they will _all_ —make it through the day, through the battle, but he can’t pretend that Tony isn’t going back to Pepper, to their engagement, to the life they’d built together. He tries to think only of tasting Tony one more time. It’s Tony who deepens the kiss, turning it dirty, insistent. He plunges his tongue into Steve’s mouth, exploring. Steve hears a groan and realizes, distantly, that it had come from himself. Tony pulls back then, but only a little, nipping and pecking at the edges of Steve’s lips.

It takes great effort for Steve to pull away. “I have to get my uniform.”

“Right, of course,” Tony says quickly, stepping back and turning around before Steve can see the look in his eyes.

“Okay,” Steve says—rather dumbly, he thinks.

Tony’s rummaging through his luggage. Steve hears him inhale, like he’s about to speak, but Steve waits and Tony doesn’t say anything.

“I—” Steve starts, but then Tony straightens and looks right at him, eyes bright and hard. His eyes are always so expressive, but for the life of him, Steve doesn’t know what they’re expressing right now.

“What?” Tony says, soft and snappish at once.

Steve swipes at his hair with a hand, trying not to shift nervously on his feet. “I’ll see you at the meeting, then,” he says at last.

Tony stares at him. “Right.” He nods, a tight, jerky motion. “See you.” He turns back around, pulls a tablet from his bag, and starts tapping at it.

Steve watches him for a moment before leaving. He reminds himself of the need to focus on the mission ahead of them. If their plan doesn’t work, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

He’s relieved to make it to his room without running into anyone. It’s not that he’s embarrassed to be walking out of Tony’s door in the morning, more that he doesn’t want to have a conversation about it.

It’s quick work to get the uniform on and head to the control room. Bruce, Thor, and Loki are already there, bickering companionably. It doesn’t take long for everyone else—including Quill, Groot, Rocket, Drax, and Mantis—to join them. Tony comes in alongside Rhodes, in the midst of a hushed conversation Steve wishes he could overhear. Their voices drop off once they cross the threshold, though, well before they’re in range for Steve make out what they’re saying. Tony leans against a console, his hands in his pockets, his face blank and his gaze sharp as he takes in everyone assembled together.

Bruce is the first to speak up. He reviews everything they know about the gravity cloud. It’s already warping their ships, bending the hulls slightly out of alignment, but he assures them it would take days, if not weeks, for the phenomenon to do major structural damage to anything as small as the Wakandan vessels or the Guardians’ craft. “Hopefully it will work faster on Thanos’ ship,” he adds. “A lot faster.”

Strange and T’Challa do most of the talking after that. The overall plan is simple: turn off their own shields, send a signal they know Thanos won’t ignore, and then wait for him to come to them. Steve listens and gives his input when necessary, but really, he thinks, it comes down to little more than “together” and the conjecture that the gravity cloud will give them an advantage in the battle.

The conversation breaks up into smaller pieces, then, a back and forth about specific tactics and maneuvers. It coalesces into a single discussion once more when Thor interrupts, “I won’t leave until my hammer is lodged in Thanos’ skull.”

“Or you’re dead,” Loki says, in a carrying mutter. Thor just looks thoughtful at this, nodding a little in agreement.

“Is that, um, really our ultimate goal, though?” Bruce asks.

Rocket makes a growling noise that might be him clearing his throat. “What else would it be?”

“We can still destroy the Stones we have before Thanos can assemble the full Gauntlet,” Tony says. He’s drawn himself up, no longer lounging against the console, his arms crossed.

“No,” Strange says, holding Tony’s gaze.

“So we must kill him before he can get the remaining Stones,” T’Challa says.

“Or,” Quill puts in, before anyone can say anything else, “We get the Gauntlet first. Make it so Thanos and all his bullshit never even existed.”

“Or the Stones never did,” Sam agrees.

“There wouldn’t be a Chitauri invasion,” Tony says. “Or Ultron.”

“Or Vision,” Wanda interrupts sharply.

“All irrelevant, because it wouldn’t work,” Strange tells them with finality. “The Stones don’t have that power.”

“I thought they were ‘infinite,’” Bucky scoffs.

“It is indeed a misnomer,” Drax says with a nod.

“But we can use them to kill Thanos and get Gamora back. Right?” Quill looks around, increasingly panicked. “Right?”

“Potentially,” Wong allows. “Whoever wields the Gauntlet must believe entirely in what they wish to accomplish.”

“But it can restore the dead?” Thor asks, and Steve knows he’s thinking of all the Asgardians who Thanos killed.

“The full Gauntlet could, yes,” Strange says.

Wong sighs. “It must be done properly, however. They can be brought back by altering reality and retrieving their souls, but changing time so that they never died could cause reality to unravel.”

“Well, we don’t want that,” Okoye agrees dryly.

“So if we retrieve the Gauntlet, we can undo some of what Thanos has done,” T’Challa says. “Who will do so? One of the wizards?” He nods toward Strange and Wong.

Strange shakes his head. “That much power would overwhelm a human. Even a master of the mystic arts.”

“An Asgardian, then?” Bruce suggests.

“Not Loki,” Natasha says. Loki scoffs in reply.

“Yes, Thor could probably do it,” Strange says. “Wanda, too.”

“I’m human,” Wanda protests.

Strange shrugs, apparently unbothered by the implications of his pronouncement. “The Mind Stone changed you. Your magic draws from the same source as the rest of the Stones.”

“Thor’s little Jane played host to the Aether for some days, as I recall,” Loki says, one imperious brow arched.

Thor casts his brother a sharp glance. “And it nearly killed her.”

“Well, I held the purple one with no problem,” Quill puts in, puffing out his chest.

Groot rolls his eyes. “I am Groot.”

“It was for a very short period of time,” Drax says.

“Yeah, and you weren’t alone, either,” Rocket agrees.

Quill ends up recounting a rather confusing story—made more so by interruptions from Drax, Rocket, and Groot—about holding hands with the other Guardians and using the Power Stone to defeat an agent of Thanos some years previous. Thor and Loki fill in some gaps about Jane Foster’s use of the Reality Stone.

“It is still not advisable for most of you to try to wield the Gauntlet,” Wong says. “It could destroy you before you’re able to use it.”

“So it has to be Thor or Wanda,” Bruce says, running a hand over his face.

“We will all make sure you are both alive to do so,” Vision proclaims, taking Wanda’s hand.

“Ippie-yai-kay, motherfucker,” Mantis says. Tony makes a pained noise at that.

“No, it’s—” Quill cuts himself off with a sigh, shaking his head. “Never mind.”

“Let us begin, then,” T’Challa says.

It goes by in a whirl after that. The whole group goes quiet, full of anticipation or nerves or excitement, Steve isn’t sure which. T’Challa and Rocket do something to remotely disable the shields of the other ships and send the signal they’d agreed on.

“Not long now,” Thor says, watching an array of screens.

The wait is tense. Steve isn’t sure how long it takes. It could be minutes or hours—he’s slipped into a battle mindset, focused entirely in the moment, his body keyed up in anticipation.

When Thanos’s ship flashes into space beside theirs, Steve feels like the wind is knocked out of him. The craft is _huge_. Staggeringly so. Even compared to the Black Order’s ships, it’s vast. It seems more on the scale of a moon or a planet than a vessel. Steve can barely make sense of it, of what could be housed in such a structure, of how many weapons, how many armies, it could house—he doesn’t have time to, because Strange and Wong are already creating gold-rimmed portals into Thanos’ ship. Dark walls loom beyond, a stark contrast to the magical fiery outlines of the portals.

“This will take you close to the heart of the ship,” Strange explains. “Where Thanos is.”

“Where we think he is,” Wong amends.

“The gravity cloud is already damaging his ship,” T’Challa reports from across the room. Rocket and Groot are through the portals first, Drax, Mantis, and Quill at their heels.

“In less than five hours, it will be destroyed entirely,” Okoye says.

“So let’s make sure we keep him here and distracted in time for that to happen,” Bucky says, stepping forward.

Steve watches Bucky and Sam jump through a portal with practiced ease, Tony and Rhodes stepping into the one beside them. Thor, Loki, Wanda, and Vision are next.

“Remember,” Strange says as Thor and Wanda step forward, “The strength of your convictions.”

Thor nods, and then he’s gone, Loki with him. Wanda takes a deep breath, and she and Vision follow suit. Steve approaches a portal, his shield on his arm, Natasha beside him. He sees a group of Outriders barrelling into the room beyond, and moves to meet them.

Soon he’s in a familiar haze of battle. Every breath is dedicated to movement, attacking and dodging and blocking. He barely spares a thought for the stench, the darkness, the shrieks of the Outriders, let alone the stakes of what’s happening. He knows that if he allows his attention to wander he risks being overwhelmed. All he can do is take on what’s in front of him.

When he comes back to himself some hours later, he’s in another part of the ship, a vast room the size of a cathedral. It’s dim and so crowded with the corpses of fallen Outriders that there’s hardly any bare floor still visible. Thor is mowing down dozens more as he barrels toward Thanos, blue-tinged lightning cascading off of him. Steve sees Loki and Strange casting strands of magic a few feet away, uncanny lines of light restraining the coiled muscles of the Outriders that surround them, forming whirling circles and symbols that coalesce into bolts of energy and luminous missiles. Tony’s in his armor above them, blasting through still more Outriders. There’s a scorched circle of bodies around the three of them, piled higher than anywhere else.

Steve has lost track of everyone else. They must be elsewhere in the ship.

He hopes that’s it, anyway. Thanos has the Mind Stone, now. Steve doesn’t want to examine this fact too closely.

They’ve made their way deep into the bowels of the gargantuan ship, insulated from the void of space by several layers of rooms, passages, and airlocks, even as the gravity cloud is ripping into the hull. Though by now—by now it may have torn apart the entire outer walls of the ship, may be working on peeling open the next layer of bulkhead, or the one after that. It could be about to tear through the metal walls of the cathedral-sized room they’re fighting in now, sucking them all into the void.

That would be one way to end all of it, at least. If it happened fast enough, if their battle is sufficient distraction to keep him from using the Space Stone in time, even Thanos wouldn’t be able to survive vacuum.

Steve slams his shield into an Outrider and swerves away from the claws of another. For now, there aren’t so many of them on him that he needs his full concentration. He tries to focus on fighting his way between Strange and Thanos—Strange shouldn’t be here, not this close to Thanos when the Time Stone is the last one he needs—but even that isn’t enough to occupy his mind. Instead he remembers what he’s referring to, internally, as “That Morning,” though of course it’s all just the cold, endless dark of space—waking up with Tony beside him, sharing a final kiss together.

That quiet, heated moment is gone. He will never have it again. It’s a memory now, one to cherish, to celebrate. But not to distract from what needs to be done now. Now is the heavy shadows cast across the expansive room, the flash of Thanos’ beams pummeling Thor and Thor’s answering streams of lightning, the thunder that echoes off of him and reverberates into Steve’s bones. It’s the cries of the Outriders, the smell of sulfur that he thinks might be their blood—brimstone, the smell of demons, a distant, Catholic part of his brain supplies. He clambers over the scaly, clawed corpses, slicing and bashing his way through the Outriders that swarm him. Stepping over their bodies, fighting his way through them, is like ascending a shifting mound of dry sand. His legs are starting to ache, which means he’s been at this much longer than he previously realized. But he has to protect Strange and the Stone.

Steve isn’t looking when it happens. He’s facing Strange and Loki, pushing his way toward them, so all he knows is the blinding white light that floods the room.

When he turns, it’s to see Stormbreaker embedded in Thanos’ neck, Thor dropping to one side, singed and staggering as still more Outriders rush him. He’s been hit by a blast from the Gauntlet, with the power of five of the Stones.

“Brother!” Loki yells, already abandoning the melee directly before him. Half the threads of light around him vanish as he pivots all at once toward where Thor and Thanos are now lying, both motionless.

That’s when the ship starts to break apart.

The comparative quiet that descended after Thor falls is pierced by a thunderous cacophony. Bodies of Outriders tumble and slide under Steve’s still-moving feet as the ground shudders and rips. Distantly, he can see the gleam of red and gold that means Tony is heading toward him.

Then it all stops.

No, it doesn’t stop. It _slows_.

The gash in the wall of the ship unfurls almost imperceptibly, revealing one pinprick star after another as the gash of black sky infinitesimally expands. Debris floats just beyond the breach, evidence of the destruction and violence already wrought. Around him, Outriders are moving as if through molasses. Loki is caught in mid-leap, the billows of his cloak suspended in the air.

Steve is still moving at full speed, he realizes. He hasn’t stopped his progress toward Strange, hasn’t slowed to the pace of everything around him. He pushes and ducks his way through the suspended bodies of Outriders until he’s only a few feet away from Strange’s hovering, cross-legged form.

And Strange is at normal speed, too, Steve sees. A glowing green aura expands around Strange, neon-bright filaments and circumferences cascading around his wrists. His hands cut through the air in a series of precise movements, the sharp bend of knuckles and splaying of fingers forming a language of unfathomable gesture. After a final, decisive gesticulation, the aperture of the Eye of Agamotto slots open.

Steve is almost to him when the Time Stone emerges, floating, from its container. “Fix it,” Strange breathes, then collapses. The chartreuse mandalas wink out, leaving just the blossom of green light that emanates from the hovering Stone.

He follows its movement with his eyes; it soars across the room and affixes itself to the Gauntlet.

Which Tony has just landed beside.

Steve is running toward him before he’s fully taken in what he’s seeing. Tony bends over Thanos’ body, reaching for his left arm, all moving at normal speed. Why is this happening in real time, so quickly, when everything else is nearly frozen? Why now, when Steve needs more than ever to get there faster?

The Iron Man helmet retracts and Tony turns to give Steve a small, wan smile. “Steve,” he says.

Steve’s almost to him. In just another moment, he’ll be able to reach him. Stop him. Strange told them what would happen if a human tried to wield the Gauntlet. It would tear them apart. It was supposed to be Thor or Wanda, someone who could withstand the power of the Stones. It wasn’t supposed to be Tony.

“Don’t,” Steve manages to say. “Tony, please.”

But Tony already has the Gauntlet free. He holds it up in one hand. Steve can see his left arm shaking. “I love you, Steve. I’m sorry for everything.”

No, no, no. Steve launches himself at Tony, starts to yell, “Don’t—”

He feels time speed up again like a sudden gasp of breath that leaves him dizzy. He crashes into Tony, knocking him down, but the gash in the wall of the ship is spurting open, they’re being sucked toward it, into the emptiness, caught in an airless riptide—

But Strange kept _both_ of them at normal speed. Gave them both time to reach the Gauntlet.

With all the agility he has to offer, Steve grabs Tony’s left arm and brings his own hand into the Gauntlet alongside his.

Steve has been pierced by bullets going 1,700 miles per hour. He’s jumped from the top of a skyscraper and landed on the cement with only his shield to stop his fall. He’s been hit with repulsors, energy blasts, lasers, arrows, his own shield. He’s been punched by metal fists, enhanced humans, and at supersonic speeds.

He’s also been in glorious free-fall, flying with nothing but sky above and below him. He’s opened his eyes to the glittering lights of New York City, the strands of color, the lines of bridges, and the planes of buildings gleaming like the facets and reflections of a perfectly cut gemstone. He’s run so far and fast that his blood has buzzed in his ears and the wind and sky seemed to pulse with his own sweet breath. And last night, he felt Tony tight and warm and perfect around him, tasted his tongue and felt his skin shudder under his fingers.

This feels like all of that, but more.

When Steve opens his eyes, he’s not on the ship. There’s no screams of Outriders, no wrenching of bulkheads being torn apart, no sounds of energy blasts or claws rending flesh.

It’s silent. It’s still.

He sees concrete. Gray columns, curving from a low, lumbering ceiling to the gray cement of the floor. There’s chunks of cement on the ground, but they only serve to make the rest of the expanse look more bare. It’s clunky, industrial architecture, built for functionality and war.

He’s in the bunker in Siberia.

Except, instead of the bleak white light reflecting harshly off of snow and distant mountains, the sky outside is the color of flame, the horizon a blinding yellow. As if it’s burning.

And it’s not as entirely still as he first thougt, he realizes. The air shimmers as he walks through it. It feels thick and warm, like he’s passing through some viscous substance that resists his every step. He feels like he’s walking in an orange-tinted fog, blurring the edges of his vision. Or a blizzard, maybe, when the wind is so strong the flurries are moving sideways and upwards as well as down. He expects it to be damp or smoky, but it isn’t. Instead it sizzles, vibrates, as if electrically charged.

He doesn’t want to think about why this is the place he’s come to. Instead he thinks about what Tony just said to him.

_I love you, Steve. I’m sorry for everything._

Tony doesn’t apologize often. He’s said it once, this whole time that Steve has been saying _I’m sorry_ over and over. _I’m sorry I tried to hurt him_ , Tony said. Steve hadn’t expected more. A couple of times he’d said _That’s on me_ , or _I fucked up_ , but he was always focusing on the problem of the present, on how it would affect them in the future. _We’re fine, we’ve been working together, what’s the problem?_

Tony said once that he was allergic to apologies. Steve had thought he’d meant giving them, but it’s not that Tony doesn’t think he’s at fault. He nearly always does. He just hopes to fix it before anyone else notices what he sees as his own culpability. Now, Steve thinks he meant it was receiving apologies that he couldn’t stand.

And he said he loved Steve.

He’d thought he was about to die, Steve reminds himself. But does that make it mean more, or less?

Part of him wants to deny it, say he meant something else by it. But after last night, after everything—it has to mean what Steve wants it to. Doesn’t it?

Up ahead, through the honey-colored haze, among the endless rows of pylons, he makes out a moving figure. Heading toward him.

Slowly, it coalesces into a clear form.

“Tony,” Steve breathes.

“Uh.” Tony frowns. “Did I just die?”

“Not yet,” Steve assures him, his feet carrying him mindlessly forward. “I don’t think so, anyway.” When Steve reaches Tony, he snatches Tony's left hand with his right, mimicking the movement he made moments earlier on the ship. Immediately he feels more grounded, connected to the reality they just left. Less like he’s back in that horrible day.

Tony’s here, here with him. Tony, who said he loved him. Tony, who he thought he could never have. Tony, who gave so much of himself last night, who trusted Steve with him even after everything. Even after this, Steve thinks—this brutalist gray place, where they hurt each other in so many ways. How can Tony love him after what happened here, after all the times that Steve failed him? When he has Pepper waiting for him, ready to marry him, ready to stay with him. Steve hadn’t been able to manage that. Steve’s the one who lied, who left. He’s also, he thinks for a selfish moment, the one who lost everything, who didn’t even have a home to return to, only the team and the fight, and Tony took that from him. It all circles back to Tony—Tony, who he kissed after a battle, who gave fury in return. Tony, who never listens, always acts, always fixes, always moves, whose eyes spark like burning cinders.

Beyond Tony, the gray pillars go on and on, further than they did in reality, disappearing into the tangerine-colored haze. They’re standing at the tip of one, where it arches into the room like a backwards flying buttress. Steve wants to mimic it, to curve his body over Tony’s, protect him from the memories of this place, of what they did to each other there. But all he can do is hold onto Tony’s hand.

“Guess that was kinda a dick move, huh.” Despite the flippant words, Tony’s voice is soft, searching.

“Sure was,” Steve agrees. “You really thought I’d let you do this alone?”

“Should’ve known better,” Tony agrees, starting to smile. Steve watches the corners of his eyes crinkle, the shape of his face turn upward in something approaching joy.

“You ready?”

“Maybe.” Tony’s expression loses some of its buoyancy. “What are we doing?”

“The plan. Right?”

“Right, yeah. The plan.”

“And then what?”

Tony’s lips quirk up on one side. “You think there’s going to be anything after this?”

“I can hope there is,” Steve says, leaning forward to rest his forehead against Tony’s. “How do we do this?”

“Strange said ‘conviction of belief,’ right?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Then I guess we just… believe,” Tony says, but he’s frowning, like he’s already not sure. “Like Tinkerbell.”

"We're here. Together. You can do it."

"We'll find out, I guess."

"No. You said you love me,” Steve insists. “And I love you, too. That has to mean something.”

Tony’s eyes flash open. “Is that right?”

Steve slots their mouths together and parts his lips over Tony’s. Tony opens for him, and he can feel the tip of Tony’s tongue brush his own. Steve’s free hand finds the back of Tony’s neck. In reply, Tony angles his head to deepen the kiss, breaches his tongue over Steve’s lips. His body is warm and firm and perfect against Steve’s own. He wants to lose himself in the slip and slide, the give and take of flesh and skin. He could do this forever. Here, he could. He can do it right, not like when they were last in the place that looked like this, when they did everything wrong. Now, there’s no time, no reality.

It’s that thought that compels him to pull away. They have a responsibility to what _is_ real. That’s why they’re here.

He savors the feel of Tony’s breath close against his face. _We’re in this together,_ Steve thinks. Their hands clutch together even tighter. He can feel Tony’s thoughts, then: a wish, a dream, a solution. _Together_ , Tony’s thoughts agree. Steve concentrates on that hope, the plan they’ve made together. They can’t fix everything, but they can make some things better.

The blocky, towering gray columns dissolve. In their place, the miasmic oranges and golds flicker and crystallize, adhering into feathery motes of dust.

Something stutters and shudders in Steve’s chest. He sees it all again—Bucky crumbling. The ashes, the cinders that were all that remained of him when he fell. But then they shimmer, twinkle—and he sees that they aren’t remnants, they’re sparks; he sees them flaring and fusing together. Igniting. They catch, and the air is aflame. Everything is heat and light, blinding and searing and orange.

All at once, it stops.

Steve opens his eyes.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve wakes up in Wakanda. He and Tony talk about what happened, then join a party celebrating their victory. After the party, Steve learns they still have more to work out between them than he realized.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a single paragraph of almost-smut. If you want to skip it, it’s the paragraph that starts “Their bodies come together, then.”

Steve is in bed, lying on his side. Pearly beams of sunlight cascade through a bare, bright room with white walls. The structured, octagonal shapes of the window frame makes him think he’s in Wakanda; a glimpse of the gleaming city outside confirms it.

There’s someone lying beside him, an arm wrapped around his shoulders. Steve shifts onto his back, careful not to dislodge the embrace.

“You’re awake,” Tony says, pulling his lips into a too-tentative smile.

“How long was I out?” he asks, settling a hand on the back of Tony’s head.

“Just a couple of days. We only got back to Earth this morning. I think, anyway—I was out until a few hours ago myself. Thought I’d keep you company until you rejoined the land of the living.” His words are light but his eyes are flicking all over Steve’s face, like he’s looking for something he can’t find. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Steve assures him. He aches, a soreness in his muscles beyond even the burn and exhaustion of fighting. “What happened?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Tony says quickly. “ _Everyone_. They’ll want to see you. Can I just—keep you to myself for a bit more? I—we have some things to talk about.”

“Of course.”

“We did it,” he says, a little breathless. “Steve, we saved them.”

“I knew we would do it,” Steve says softly.

“So, here’s a question. I know, um. Battles, end of the universe. Heat of the moment type thing. Eerie magical bunker dreamscape. So when you said you love me—”

“I meant it. I love you, so much, I—”

“Me, too,” Tony cuts in quickly.

“Really? After everything?” Steve whispers.

“Sometimes it feels like I’ve always loved you.” He says it like he’s confessing to murder. “I didn’t think you’d ever—we were barely friends. We’d have these—moments maybe. Sometimes. But. We didn’t trust each other. And all that time on the ship, you kept talking about being _friends_ again.”

“That’s a good point, actually.” Steve chews on his lip. “For us, weeks have passed. For everyone else, it’s only been a few days. Pepper—”

“I know. God, she deserves so much better. But it—it wasn’t working. For a while. We were trying, with the wedding, but. We don’t have a date, or a venue. We went to Paris to buy a dress, but she didn’t even try anything on. It was never going to happen.” He closes his eyes and inhales deeply. “On Titan, the first time. We almost had him, we could’ve ended it right there, but then Quill learned what Thanos had done to Gamora. He lost it. And I knew I should’ve been thinking about Pepper, if it was her that he’d killed. But instead I was…” Tony’s voice is breaking, choked. Steve holds him closer. “In Sokovia, at that Hydra base, when we were after the scepter—the vision that Wanda showed me. Everyone died, everyone but me.”

 _It’s like I was there just to watch._ Yes, Steve remembers. He can’t forget the nightmare Tony described to him, the wreckage of spacecraft and detritus of battle, the bodies of the Avengers, all their friends. Leaving Tony alone to witness it.

“You were dead,” Tony goes on thickly. “And it was my fault. That’s what I thought of on Titan. I hadn’t spoken to you in two years but I kept thinking about you, about if it was you he’d killed. I would’ve fucked it all up, too. Hell, I did anyway. And you could’ve been—you—” he breaks off with something like a sob.

“Shh,” Steve kisses his forehead, cups his face with one hand. “It’s okay. It didn’t happen. We’re here, we’re okay. I’ve got you.”

“So. You and me, then.” Tony’s voice is steadier now, but still uncertain. “Are we—together? Do you want to be?”

“Yes, god yes. Do you?”

“Fuck yeah. Okay, so. Cards on the table. How do you feel about being in a relationship with a guy who’s pushing 50 and just now figured out he wants to be a dad?”

“I dunno,” Steve says through a smile. “How do you feel about being in a relationship with a 100-year-old international fugitive?”

“Shit, right.” Tony buries his head into Steve’s chest. “Should’ve fixed that too.”

“Wouldn’t have worked.”

“Yeah, probably not,” Tony says sourly, lifting his face back up to meet Steve’s eyes. “That’s the thing. Other than a dozen or so superheroes and those dumbass Guardians and some Asgardians—Asgardians who remember being dead, by the way, that’s _gotta_ be a mindfuck—no one knows that the world almost ended or that we saved it. I mean. I’m glad there wasn’t a giant donut spaceship fucking up Greenwich Village. But some acknowledgement would certainly have gone a long way to greasing the wheels, politically.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“Your optimism is enviable.”

“Tony. We just saved the universe. We’ll figure it out.”

“Fine, whatever you say.”

“How’d we do that, anyway? Why aren’t we dead?”

“No one’s sure, actually,” Tony replies. “But the prevailing hypothesis is: a bunch of things. If either of us had tried it alone we definitely would’ve fried. Quill and the other Guardians shared the Power Stone a few years back, so there’s that. The arc reactor is powered by an element I synthesized based off the tesseract. You’ve got the serum. And apparently the strength of our convictions was pretty fucking strong.”

“I could’ve told you that last one,” Steve says. “I think we’ve just proved we’re the two most stubborn people in the universe.”

“Well.” Tony nuzzles his face, burrows against him. “People put up with us anyway, for some reason.”

“Should we go see them now?”

“We could,” Tony says slowly. “But there’s a party tonight. We were hoping you’d be around to join the celebrations. It’s just a few hours from now.”

“I’ll see them at the party, then.” Steve wants some time to be still, to savor their victory on his own—and to have Tony to himself.

“So—I’ll stay too?”

Steve pulls Tony close in answer. Tony lets out a rush of air and goes liquid in his arms.

They lay like that for a few minutes before Tony gets restless. He sits up and takes out his phone. “Just going to text everyone that you’re awake and fine and will see them later,” he explains.

Steve pushes himself up too, then tugs Tony toward him, so they’re leaning against each other. He watches Tony send the texts, then pull up a hologram of schematics.

“Are you working?” Steve asks. He’d been almost ready to drift back to sleep, himself.

“Nah, this is fun,” Tony replies. He brings his hands together over the glowing image, making it zoom out to show the spacecraft they’d been inhabiting. “Maybe I’ll learn something I can use for my next armor.”

Time passes, smooth and languorous, Steve wrapped around Tony, taking in the glowing diagrams and numbers moving under Tony’s hands. Steve drifts in and out of full wakefulness as Tony shifts and mutters to himself. Tony swears and apologizes each time, promising to be quiet and still, and each time Steve insists he not bother. Steve breathes in Tony’s scent, feels the sunlight on his skin, catalogs each moment in his mind so he can return to it whenever he needs it.

Eventually, an alarm rings from Tony’s phone. He shuts it off and swipes his holograms away, stretching and turning to look at Steve. “You ready to get up and see everyone?”

“As long as you’re with me.”

“Always,” Tony assures him, drawing back to look at him with something like wonder.

They ease out of bed slowly. He wants to see Bucky, Sam, Natasha, T’Challa, everyone—but he also wouldn’t mind if this lasted a bit longer too.

He finds his go bag in a corner and pulls on fresh clothes. Tony watches him, looking thoughtful. “What’s going through that head of yours?” Steve asks, taking Tony’s hand and pressing it to his lips.

“Just ogling you, of course.” Tony’s mouth quirks up on one side, his eyes never leaving Steve’s.

Tony lets go of his hand once they leave the room. Steve tries not to dwell on it.

“Thor says they’re in the west dining room,” Tony says. “You know where that is?”

“This way.” Steve leads Tony down the hallway, past doors and balconies and towering potted trees. The walls are patterned with textured, geometric blocks of wood, like cubist paintings brought to life.

He can hear the party before they reach it. It figures that Tony set an alarm for arriving fashionably late. Soon they’re inside the dining room—more of a banquet hall, really. It’s even vaster than Steve remembered from his last visit inside the palace, and feels larger still for how the curved, sunlit window dominates an entire wall and part of the ceiling, as if the interior space opens out onto the city beyond. But as large as it is, it’s full. Of voices, laughter, unhurried footsteps, the clink of plates and glassware. Of the Dora Milaje, of hundreds of Asgardians, of aliens and humans and life. Of the people he’s fought beside, counted as his teammates, his friends, his family. He stares for a moment, taking it all in. It’s everything he hoped for.

Bucky finds them first. “Thought you might be down for another seventy years,” he grouses. But he’s smiling, and then Steve’s being hugged.

“Gotta stick around and keep you out of trouble,” he replies.

Bucky just grins, reaches a hand up to muss Steve’s hair. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Tony stepping away, but Bucky’s not letting him. “No hard feelings, right Stark?” Bucky says; he’s standing so his body blocks Tony’s path further into the room, but he’s still keeping his distance.

“Yeah, well, Nat says you’re alright, and I’m trying to stay on her good side,” Tony says after a moment. He creases his mouth up into a smile and slaps Bucky on the shoulder companionably, then sidesteps him and makes his way through the crowd.

Bucky leans into Steve. “ _Nat’s_ good side, yeah right,” he mutters.

Sam shows up a moment later, giggling tipsily when he embraces Steve. “You have to hear this raccoon, Steve, he’s such a little shit, c’mere.”

“Rocket’s an asshole,” Bucky grumbles.

Sam snickers. “Yeah,” he agrees.

Steve lets himself be dragged to a group of Asgardians standing clustered around two high bar stools, Rocket standing on one and expounding about Earth music, Groot sitting hunched on the other, playing his handheld game. Sam hands Steve a drink and then he’s being rapidly introduced to everyone —the Asgardians all have names like Aldrif, Honir, Sigurd, and Kelda. Sam and Rocket immediately descend into an argument about Michael Jackson, and Steve’s eyes drift across the room until they land on Tony.

Tony’s standing with Rhodes, their heads bent together, Tony making a pleased, almost serene expression Steve rarely sees on him. He laughs at something Rhodes’ says, and when it fades his face settles into a smile that seems reserved just for Rhodes. Steve’s chest warms, and with effort, he turns his attention back to the discussion beside him.

Steve makes his round of the hall, chatting with T’Challa and Nakia, each of the Avengers and Guardians, and more Asgardians than even his enhanced memory can keep track of. His eyes keep being pulled toward Tony, though, like a plant toward sunlight.

Tony having some sort of intense discussion with Nebula. Tony standing in a corner, holding his phone against one ear and staring out the window at the city beyond. Tony, Sam, and Mantis coaxing a smile out of Gamora. Tony at a table laid out with glasses, ice, and bottles—bottles of alcohol, mixers, and bubbling liquids Steve doesn’t recognize, in so many different colors and shapes and sizes that some of them must have come from outer space—mixing drinks for Natasha and the Valkyrie. Tony listening to his phone again, his eyes closed this time.

Steve’s just about to see how Tony’s doing when he’s cornered into a conversation with Okoye, who, it transpires, has just had her fill of conversation with Peter Quill and needed to make a swift exit. She’s soon replaced by Thor, Strange, and Loki, who for some reason want Steve’s ruling on what Thor is calling a spell he can perform, Loki is calling a cantrip, and Strange is just calling pitiful.

Throughout the hall, people are chatting, eating, laughing. Groot is showing Sam how to play his hand-held game. Nebula and Gamora stand inches from each other, yelling and shoving—but the next time Steve turns their way they’re embracing. Wong seems to be trying to teach Bucky a sleight of hand card trick. Quill, Mantis, Drax, and a handful of Asgardians are doing what Steve think is some sort of wiggling, modern dance move, while Vision and Wanda slowly waltz through the spaces between them, even though there’s no music playing.

Elsewhere, Shuri is urging M’Baku and the Valkyrie away from a table already littered with empty bottles and shot glasses. M’Baku lets himself be pulled up by Shuri’s coaxing arms, stumbles for a moment when she lets go, and then lets out a laugh that shakes his whole body, Shuri grinning along with him. The Valkyrie rolls her eyes and makes her way to a nearby knot of Dora Milaje. Across the room, Thor is speaking animatedly to Heimdall, who looks amused, and Nebula, who doesn’t. Natasha, Okoye, and Nakia have taken over the table that M’Baku and the Valkyrie vacated, sharing quiet smiles and stacking glasses into an increasingly unstable tower.

Wanda and Vision are the first pair of people Steve sees leave the banquet hall, wrapped up in each other, whispering and smiling and seemingly unaware of anyone else. Others start drifting off in ones and twos after that. And threes—he’s sure he sees Nakia and T’Challa sweep over to where some sort of drinking game is taking place and then emerge hand-in-hand with M’Baku, who has his thrown head back in hearty laughter as they walk out the arched doorway. Rhodes makes his exit along side a tall, dark-haired Asgardian woman wearing all black and a leather jacket.

He watches as Bucky approaches Natasha, sitting alone now at a cocktail table, absently swirling a glass of something violently blue. He wraps his arms around her from behind and she leans into it, smiling and saying something Steve can’t hear. He pulls her to her feet and Steve turns away for a moment as they share a kiss. He thinks they’ll be heading out together now, too, but when he looks up again they’ve gone in opposite directions. Natasha has her mouth over Bruce’s ear, cupping it with one hand, gently tugging him away from his conversation with Shuri. Meanwhile Thor and Bucky are huddled together, smiling widely, sharing some story or another. A few minutes later, all four of them walk out together. Bucky has an arm around Natasha’s waist; she has one hand on the small of Bucky’s back and the other is intertwined with Bruce’s. Bruce is looking a little red-faced, while Thor grins and slings an arm over his shoulder. That’s…something, alright.

Steve doesn’t have long to dwell on it before Quill announces he’s hosting an after-party in the _Benatar_ , and he and the other Guardians walk, swagger, and stagger out. Gamora has her hand on Quill’s rear, and they’re trailed by Sam, Wong, a few dozen Asgardians and Wakandans Steve doesn’t recognize, and someone who seems to be made out of rocks. That kind of mass departure is as sure a sign as anything that this part of the evening is winding to a close.

He makes his way over to Tony, who has his phone out again, though he’s just staring at it for now. “Hey,” Steve says.

Tony turns and lights up with a smile when he sees it’s Steve approaching him. It’s not quite the same as the one he gave to Rhodes, but Steve likes to think it’s just as bright and warm. “Hey,” he says, slipping his phone into his pants pocket. “You thinking of calling it a night?”

“Yeah. You coming with me?”

Tony’s smile, impossibly, widens. “Absolutely. You go on ahead, I’ll meet you back in your room in ten minutes. Okay?”

Steve fights back a frown. “Sure.”

He tries not to be bothered about making his way back through the palace halls alone. He’s not sure what to think of it, but he thinks about it anyway. A part of him wants to call his concern petty. In comparison to some of the things he’s been through—in the last few days in particular—maybe it is. But it’s his to dwell on, so he does until the door opens and Tony comes in.

“Hey,” Tony says through a soft smile, taking Steve’s face in his hand and finding Steve’s lips with his own. Steve leans into it and lets his anxieties be reassured, for a moment, by how Tony’s tongue slides past the seam of his mouth.

“Tony,” Steve forces himself to say. “Do you want to keep our relationship a secret from our friends?”

“Hey, chill, we’ve been together for less than an afternoon. I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it, didn’t wanna put everything out there until I knew you were on the same page.”

Steve knows what he means by _together_ —that it really only has been a matter of hours since they talked—but it still feels like they’ve been the two of them, together, for much longer. “I don’t mind if everyone knows,” Steve says, though that’s understating it a bit.

“Good,” Tony breathes, his hand finding Steve’s hair. “Come sit here with me, it’s easier to talk about this sort of thing in bed.”

Steve lets himself be pulled down to the edge of the bed. “Don’t distract me.”

“Later,” Tony promises, nipping at Steve’s throat once before pulling away to look at him. “Here’s something about me, okay? I spent my whole childhood hearing about Captain America. How great he was, a true hero, a guy who always did the right thing. Then I met you, and you were just a guy—a fucking _kid_ , practically—and then we were friends, sometimes” —Tony’s voice is a little thick, and his eyes never leave Steve’s, but somehow he continues, seemingly unaware of the pang of sadness that’s hit Steve at that description— “and then I fucked up, and then you fucked up, and I was so angry, but not for very long, really. Mostly I just kept thinking about how even when I tried to do the right thing, it didn’t work out, everything fell apart anyway, and I couldn’t get it right no matter how much I tried. I still couldn’t do anything that compared to Captain America. So it’s hard to get used to this idea that it can be okay between us, or not even just okay, but—like this.” He slides a hand down Steve’s torso to illustrate _this_ , making him shudder.

“You glossed over a few things there, genius.”

“Oh, now I’m gonna hear it.” Tony’s mouth quirks into a lopsided smirk.  

“How much I fucked up, for one thing. I _am_ just a guy, and trying to do what’s right is all any of us can do. And you do so well, Tony, you do so many amazing things. You help so many people.”

Tony scoffs. “Like that time I let Peter die and half the universe be annihilated?”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“Tell me it didn’t feel like it was your fault when Barnes turned to ash in front of you,” Tony says, then immediately winces. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean. It still wasn’t your fault. And you’re a hero, Tony, of course you are.”

“Not like you. I don’t do what’s right, even when I know what the right thing is.”

“You do—” Steve begins slowly, saying it as the thought coheres in his mind. “You do what you think will result in the most good.”

Tony shakes his head. “And look how well that turned out two years ago.”

“Look how well me doing what I thought was right turned out then, too,” Steve counters. “I think what the last few days showed us is it balances out, when we’re together. That we need each other.” He swallows, adds, “I need you, anyway.”

“What, you think I don’t need you?”

“You’re—you’re always ahead of me,” Steve tries to explain. “In the future. And I’ve hurt you. I promised before I never would again, and I meant it, but—but I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I will. And then you didn’t want to leave the party together.” He smiles sheepishly. “It sounds pretty stupid when I say it out loud.”

“No, hey, it’s not stupid.” Tony sighs. “We should have talked about it before. I’m excited to tell people, okay. Well, some people—Rhodey, Bruce, and Thor. Not so sure about some of your posse, but what can ya do. But I have to talk to Pepper before it goes too far. She deserves to hear it from me.”

Of course, how could Steve forget Pepper? “Okay,” he says. “Is that—was that her on the phone, earlier?”

“I was listening to voicemails. Would you believe I had 96 of them?” Tony grumbles. Steve can definitely believe it. “Only one of them was from Pepper. A lot of them were from Fury; of course _he_ knew something was going on. But no, I was listening to the ones from Peter.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Well, the first dozen were bitching about not getting to come to space with me, like I give a shit. The rest were updates about his patrols, questions about spaceships. Then some increasingly concerned ones the longer I was gone. Shuri was in touch with him, but we weren’t able to give a lot of detailed updates, I guess.” He scratches a hand through his hair. “I wanted to call him, but he’s in class right now. So I just listened to his voice, instead.”

Steve doesn’t think Peter would mind his schooling being interrupted to hear from Tony, but he just says, “He’s safe. You’ll talk to him tomorrow, it’s going to be fine.”

“Yeah,” Tony agrees, sounding like he doesn’t quite believe it. He slumps, burying his face in Steve’s chest. “God. I wish I could stay here with you forever. But I have to go back to New York soon.”

“I can’t stay either,” Steve says. It puts T’Challa in an awkward position if he’s in the country for too long.

“We’ll figure it out though, okay?” Tony says into Steve’s pectorals. “I’ll get you back home.”

 _You’re my home_ , Steve thinks, but instead of saying it, he just lifts Tony’s face up in his hands and kisses him.

Their bodies come together, then. It doesn’t take long for Steve to undress them both, to trail his hands all over Tony’s skin. Tony takes him in his mouth while Steve works him open with his hand. Steve thinks he might be reaching the edge of his self-control when Tony pulls off and demands that Steve fuck him. Steve does, knowing, this time, that Tony is his.

Steve falls asleep with Tony wrapped around him. He dreams, once more, of the vast sheet of paper. It’s pinned to what is at once a bulkhead and the trunks of trees, and in the way of dreams, it hovers entirely on its own, too. He can make out the image sketched onto it now, though it seems to be several things at once; he sees stars that are the same white as the page, motes of dust, and something that feels like ice. The longer he looks at it, the more the ice recedes. The stars take over the image, spreading beyond the boundaries of the page, warm and bright. They illuminate the space around him, too, radiating a sense of safety and calm. Where before the dark forest and spaceship walls reminded him of failed battles against the Outriders in Wakanda or the Black Order in the dark of space, now they strike him as familiar in a different way. He thinks of trees in Central Park, of Tony pulling him into his room on the ship, of victory and home and warmth.

When he wakes, he’s not cold. He’s not alone. Outside the window, the horizon gleams with the coming of the sun, gilding the border of earth with golden light that slowly fades into the cerulean blue above. He watches, feeling the warmth of lengthening sunbeams, as the sun breaches into the sky like a golden phoenix.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me [on Tumblr](http://dirigibleplumbing.tumblr.com/).
> 
> [Tumblr post](https://dirigibleplumbing.tumblr.com/post/181926931752/ashes-to-ashes-dirigibleplumbing-the-avengers) for the completed fic.
> 
> So it turns out I am a comment-consuming lich? There's no cure, alas, but you can still drop a comment and help feed your undead author. Short or even one-word comments are welcome.


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